Tanking to the Top

The architect of The Process1 had no interest in talking to me about, well, The Process. “I’m perfectly comfortable with everyone drawing their own conclusions,” Sam Hinkie told me one evening. This was the second time we’d spoken over the phone. Both conversations could be best described as frivolous. “I don’t have any interest or willingness to quote-unquote shape a legacy,” Hinkie said. “I’m not built that way. It’s just not what I want to do.”

That was back in the fall of 2018, before Hinkie ceased answering nearly every one of my texts, which, of course, was his right. This was also before he began instructing friends, family, and even employees at alma maters to decline interviews with me. Also his right, and something he’d done with countless reporters before me. But frustrating nonetheless.

An example: One morning last September I called a childhood friend of his named Duane Lovett.

“I’d love to talk,” Lovett told me. “Call me at two this afternoon.”

When the time arrived later that day, my call went to voicemail. I texted Lovett. He responded that he was going to have to “pass on that talk.” I laughed and messaged Hinkie. “I’ll say this,” I wrote, “I admire your relentless informing of people from your life to not speak with me.” I added a smiley face at the end because I’m a serious journalist.

“You should admire the depth of our relationships,” Hinkie responded.

I, however, still had a book to write, a story to tell. I still needed to illustrate who Sam Hinkie is as a person. I still needed to explain what he sought to accomplish during his two-plus years as the president of basketball operations for the National Basketball Association’s Philadelphia 76ers. There’s the obvious and simple answer—winning a championship—but it seemed to me that there must be more to it, or at least more to him. Few leaders in the history of sports have ever so willingly and aggressively sacrificed the present in order to chase a better future. Hinkie wasn’t the first to try taking advantage of the warped incentive system found in most professional sports in which bad teams are rewarded with good draft picks, but he did take this plan to a new extreme and in doing so drove the basketball world mad. Hinkie triggered a culture war. To some fans, he and his plan—dubbed by others “The Process,” as in “Trust The Process,” an homage to Hinkie’s belief in focusing on process over results—was the closest thing to religion they’d ever experienced. To others, he was the NBA’s Bernie Madoff. He angered agents, annoyed that one of the thirty teams capable of paying their clients had essentially removed itself from the marketplace, and irritated competitors, many of whom felt Hinkie was violating the first rule of professional sports, summarized so perfectly years earlier by former New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards:

You play to win the game.

If he were to talk about his own legacy, I’m guessing Hinkie would counter that he was playing to win the game, but that the only game he cared about winning was the championship. Still, there was so much more I wanted to know, so much I was curious about, so much I felt I still needed to learn, and so you can imagine my excitement when, a few weeks after the quip about his deep relationships, I discovered the name of a person who I believed could provide me a more substantive answer.

In April 2016, Hinkie officially resigned from his position with the Sixers. Five months earlier, at the behest of the NBA, the team had hired Jerry Colangelo as a special adviser. Colangelo had spent nearly fifty years as an NBA executive. He was as powerful and respected as anyone within the basketball world and not a person interested in letting others dictate. Hinkie understood exactly what his arrival meant.

Hinkie resigned, and did so via letter. But this wasn’t just another resignation letter. Addressed to the Sixers’ equity partners—and quickly leaked to the media—it went on for thirteen pages. It featured a bullet point about a flightless bird from New Zealand called the moa. It had subsections paying homage to famous investors like Charlie Munger. It quoted Abraham Lincoln twice. That neither Lincoln quote was actually spoken by Lincoln is beside the point. (Hey, who among us hasn’t been duped by the Internet?) More important, it offered an in-depth look into the mind of its author.

“Science is about predictions,” Hinkie wrote at one point. A couple sentences later he quoted a man named Tim Urban, who, Hinkie said, “will soon be recognized as one of tomorrow’s polymaths.” Then, in parenthesis, came a piece of advice. “Like many of you,” Hinkie wrote to the Sixers’ ownership group, “he lives in New York—I’d recommend meeting him for coffee sometime.”

This suggestion may not have been addressed to me, but I figured why not take Hinkie’s advice? After all, I too live in New York. Also, and more to the point, Hinkie and Urban had clearly engaged in rigorous scientific and philosophical conversations. Urban, it seemed, was a man who could provide some of the answers I was desperately searching for.

But first I had to figure out who the hell Tim Urban was.

I cued up Google and discovered that Urban was the thirty-something-year-old author of a long-form blog called Wait But Why. One of his essays, titled “How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You),” was more than fifteen thousand words and featured friendly-looking graphs and charts. Another fourteen-thousand-word entry was about cryonics and why they “make sense.” The posts were littered with references to Urban’s relationship with Elon Musk.

I found an email address and introduced myself. A few weeks later an assistant, Alicia, replied. “We should be able to set up a quick 15-minute call for this month,” she wrote. I told her that I was actually looking to follow the advice of Sam Hinkie and meet Urban for coffee.

“We stick to phone calls (or virtual coffee meetings over Skype!) as much as possible as it doesn’t break up his writing flow as much,” she replied, “and they’re much easier to schedule ahead of time as Tim’s location can be a bit unpredictable this far in advance.” Not ideal, but I figured harping on whether the coffee was shared in person or virtually was the sort of thing only non-polymaths worried about. I told Alicia that Skype was great.

Two months later, on a Friday morning, I swapped my usual outfit of sweats for jeans and stopped at the Starbucks across the street from my office to pick up a caramel macchiato.

At 10:30 I called Urban on Skype and sipped from my macchiato as the app rang. No answer. I tried again. Still no answer. Finally, on my third call, he picked up. The picture was fuzzy, but he appeared to be wearing a red flannel button-down.

“Can you see me?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“It’s a little delayed, let me try calling you back.”

He did. I answered. The picture was still delayed and fuzzy.

“Let’s try one more time,” he said.

He did. No change.

“How about I call you,” Urban said. I gave him my number. We were now stretching the boundaries of “having coffee together.”

I asked Urban how he met Hinkie. He told me that Hinkie had reached out to him a few times via email. “I know about his work, obviously,” he said. “I read his long letter and think he’s a pretty awesome dude.” He scrolled through his computer and cued up Hinkie’s first message, sent March 14, 2016. He read it out loud.

“He said that ‘my name is Sam Hinkie, I’ve become a fan of your writing, we’re headed to New York now because we play the Nets tomorrow night and I wanted to see if you possibly have any time to get together tomorrow, I’d do my best to make it interesting for you.’”

Urban doesn’t follow the NBA, but he said he recognized Hinkie’s name. “I knew the Sixers were doing a really creative and innovative type of rebuilding,” he said. “I’m a fan.” Unfortunately, he had no availability the next day. Hinkie tried again a few months later, after resigning. Once again Urban was out of town. Next, it was Urban’s turn to try. He was scheduled to be in Philadelphia around October. By then Hinkie had moved to Palo Alto.

“And then he wrote back on November 1,” Urban told me. He read Hinkie’s message out loud. “I’ll be in New York much of next week, happy to grab coffee or a meal if your schedule allows. I bet we can find a bunch to kick around.”

Urban paused for a second and tapped on his keyboard.

“Oh, shoot! I never saw this and never responded.” He seemed genuinely upset. “I can’t believe it.”

I laughed. “So you two never actually had coffee?”

“No, we never did. But I think at the time it was so imminent, it was clearly going to happen.”

I was disappointed. Also a bit confused by Hinkie suggesting others do something that he himself never did. Still, it wasn’t every day I got to speak with “one of tomorrow’s polymaths.” I figured there was still an opportunity for me to learn, to maybe gain some insight into the type of thinking Hinkie is drawn to.

I asked Urban why he believes his work appeals to Hinkie. He mentioned an idea he often writes about, which essentially boils down to inventing your own reasoning versus “copying what’s normal to do, normal to think.” He dived into a cooking analogy to illustrate his point. “A chef writes his own recipe, plays around with a bunch of ingredients, and fails often. But sometimes he comes up with something that’s totally different and new and better than we’ve had before.” A cook, on the other hand, “just takes the recipes that have succeeded the most, that are currently being followed, and builds everything around the recipes that have already been proven to work. That’s how you protect yourself from true failure—not how you become an original. The way to actually do something great, something that really surprises people and changes things, is to be more of a science experiment and actually try stuff. That’s going to lead to a lot of failure, and people who are cooks never understand the chef until the chef succeeds. But when the chef does succeed, he creates something truly transcendent.”

By now he was rolling.

“Geniuses are often mocked by society before getting rewarded,” he continued. “In the past they’d sometimes be executed. Society often thinks they’re arrogant, when really what chefs are saying is, ‘I’m more humble about what we know, about, for example, what makes a good basketball team.’”

I told Urban that boasting about one’s own humility seemed sort of oxymoronic and, well, Trumpian. “But in this case it’s really talking about humility,” he said. “The first thing a chef says in a room full of cooks is, ‘I don’t know how to best do this and that’s okay.’”

I texted Hinkie that night, informing him that I followed his advice and “had coffee” with Tim Urban. I also told him that Urban realized he had missed Hinkie’s last email and felt awful about it.

Hinkie used his iPhone to “like” the text.

Sam Hinkie wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t talk to me for this project.

“The Sixers are terrified of your book,” one former team employee told me in the fall. This was back when I was young and naïve and thought I was writing the NBA version of Moneyball, not a tale of palace intrigue more akin to Game of Thrones. This employee, like many of his former colleagues, had recently received a call from the team reminding him of the nondisclosure agreement he’d signed as part of his severance package.

I had notified the Sixers of my book contract over the summer, to let them know that I’d be reporting around the team and to see if they wanted to be involved. About a month later a public relations official called to notify me that the team would not be participating. This was fine, and sort of expected. I still possessed the credential that came along with my day job as an NBA reporter for Bleacher Report, which the Sixers allowed me to use throughout the 2018–2019 season. But my relationship with the team often felt strained. For one, current employees were told to stay away from me because I was writing this book. Sources were called by higher-ups and asked to strike quotes. Players were instructed not to have book-related conversations. At one point I had broached the idea of an in-depth interview with a Sixers player with whom I had a strong professional relationship.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll give you an hour whenever you need.”

I approached the player a couple months later about officially setting up a time.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been instructed not to do any interviews for the book. There’s nothing I can do. They’re my employer.”

Officially, I had a cordial relationship with the team the rest of the year. They even helped with one or two stories. But behind the scenes the Sixers did almost everything they could to prevent me from telling this story. Only at the very end, after I sent them a list of specific questions and offered them the opportunity to comment, did they participate in any book-related discussions. These were limited to a few off-the-record conversations with Sixers public relations officials and a quick off-the-record chat with Sixers head coach Brett Brown.

I write all this to set up the context and framing of the pages ahead. For this book I conducted interviews with about 175 people. I spoke to current and former players, basketball staffers, and business employees. I spoke to these people’s friends. I spoke to player agents. I spoke with opposing executives. Some individuals were willing to go on the record, but most of these interviews were conducted on background, meaning I could use the information but the sources had to remain anonymous. I discovered early on that to tell this story properly I needed sources who could speak candidly. (After I had started my reporting, I learned that the Sixers were contacting former employees to remind them of their nondisclosure agreements.) They needed to know that no stories or anecdotes would be traced back to them, which is why you won’t see much direct attribution in the pages ahead.

Why no one currently affiliated with the team ever tried selling me on their version of this story, I’m still not quite sure. Something about Sam Hinkie and The Process spooks the team’s ownership and management. But no matter what they do, no matter how hard they wish, The Process will always be a part of the Sixers. It hovers over the organization like a thick fog. All the drama, all the infighting between general managers and owners and CEOs and coaches and stars, all the egos and competing agendas and mysterious injuries and secret Twitter accounts can be traced back to the decision to hand the reins to Sam Hinkie in May 2013. He may be long gone, but in Philadelphia The Process lives on. This is its story.