Fans of the Philadelphia 76ers and the NBA more generally know The Process as the extreme rebuilding plan, put in place by the team’s former general manager Sam Hinkie, for the team to lose on purpose for multiple years, accumulate multiple high draft choices, and ultimately emerge out the other side as a championship contender, led by stars Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid.
The gambit, which began with Hinkie’s hiring in 2013, set off something of a cold war among the Philadelphia basketball community, between those who believed in The Process—a loud coterie of fans, NBA nerds, podcasters and bloggers—and those who did not—the majority of the city’s media and basketball establishments. And it’s continued far beyond Hinkie’s 2016 departure.
Now we have Tanking to the Top, which is the first major book about The Process. It’s by Yaron Weitzman, a national basketball writer for the sports website Bleacher Report. Weitzman may not be a local reporter or have any direct ties to Philadelphia, but he does demonstrate a very keen understanding of what The Process was about and the battles that were fought over it. In addition, Weitzman is reasonably fair to both sides of those battles.
The Process has always seemed like a natural as the subject of a book in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball. That book, published in 2003, looked at Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane’s pioneering use of statistical analysis in building an underdog contender in the early 2000s. Moneyball was a massive bestseller, caused Beane’s ideas to gain widespread purchase in the world of baseball and beyond, and even led to a popular movie adaptation starring Brad Pitt.
Tanking to the Top is different from Moneyball in a couple of key ways. One, it’s not overly dedicated to making the case for Sam Hinkie’s genius—in fact, it details a lot of key ways in which the former executive screwed up.
And two, unlike Beane’s extensive cooperation with Moneyball, Sam Hinkie did not agree to speak with Weitzman for the book. He’s quoted only from a pair of old podcast interviews, and from a couple of occasions when the author met or texted with Hinkie but did not yield any quotes about his time in Philadelphia. On top of that, the Sixers’ organization made clear they weren’t so happy with the book either.
The lack of Hinkie interviews is certainly to the book’s detriment, although it wasn’t for lack of trying on the author’s part.
Tanking to the Top goes through and details all of the strange episodes that have been part of Sixers’ story in the last decade, and shares the inside stories of all of them: The Andrew Bynum debacle, Hinkie’s hiring, the loss-filled early years, the three years of first-round draft picks’ season-ending injuries, Hinkie’s resignation letter, the downfall of successor Bryan Colangelo in a bizarre Twitter scandal, the flameout of #1 overall draft pick Markelle Fultz, the arrival and quick departure of star Jimmy Butler, and the assembling of the team’s current core.
The book has quite a few eye-opening revelations. Charles Kushner, father of Jared, was in talks to buy the Sixers in the early 2010s, something that inspires a long list of what-ifs. Nerlens Noel, a former Sixers player generally beloved by Process-trusters, is depicted as wildly immature, constantly late for practices and team flights, and smelling of marijuana much of the time. And a continuing theme throughout the book—one echoed especially often these days—is that coach Brett Brown isn’t much of a disciplinarian, which is something that hurt the team both in the Process days and today.
While Weitzman’s narrative is clearly sympathetic to The Process in many respects, it also acknowledges that Hinkie wasn’t a particularly good manager or communicator, and that he regularly alienated players, agents, media members, and other front offices. The more over-the-top critiques of The Process remain false—no, it wasn’t a “Ponzi scheme,” nor was Hinkie’s intention ever to continue losing forever—but that doesn’t make some of the more mainstream critiques invalid. Treating players like assets, the book argues, has its pitfalls.
One worthwhile thing that Weitzman’s book returns to repeatedly is that these sports figures, who the world regards largely in terms of what they do on the court, have often been through unspeakable traumas. Sam Hinkie’s older brother died of suicide when Hinkie was just ten. Jahlil Okafor’s mother died in front of him when he was a child. Joel Embiid’s 10-year-old brother was killed in a car accident in Cameroon in the early part of Embiid’s career. This is all worth noting, especially as many fans treat a midseason loss like a matter of life and death.
The 76ers’ Process, of course, hasn’t resulted in a championship as of yet, although that doesn’t quite hurt the value of Weitzman’s book. After all, Billy Beane’s Moneyball A’s never won anything either. The one book of this kind about an actual championship team was Ben Reiter’s 2018 Astroball, about the supposed revolutionary genius of the 2017 World Series-winning Houston Astros—which we now know was the result of a cheating scandal that has torched the reputations of several of the figures who were specifically lauded in Reiter’s book.
Whether The Process was a success or a failure is something that’s still a contentious debate even to this day. Yes, Sam Hinkie whiffed on quite a few draft picks, alienated much of the basketball world, and failed to hang on to his job. But he also set events in motion that turned the Sixers into a perennial playoff team. And both the endless arguments about The Process and the team’s run of contention have made professional basketball matter in Philadelphia in a way it hadn’t for many years.
There will likely be other books about The Process in the future, possibly from local authors or those with a strident point of view for or against it, and some of them may even manage to get Sam Hinkie to speak on the record. But until then, Tanking to the Top is a fine, very entertaining tick-tock of a unique episode in Philadelphia sports history.
Tanking To The Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process In The History of Professional Sports
By Yaron Weitzman
Grand Central Publishing
Published on March 17, 2020
304 pages
Stephen Silver is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is a contributor to The National Interest, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The cofounder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons.