The Twitter scandal involving Bryan Colangelo and the Philadelphia 76ers’ is poetic justice. It is karmic retribution for a league that chose to do the safe thing instead of the correct thing.
Regardless of your feelings about tanking, or the idea of sportsmanship, there’s one clear fact about Sam Hinkie’s “Process”: it exposed a flaw in the NBA’s system. Clearly, the nature of the league and its draft created an incentive for teams to lose on purpose. Hinkie chose to follow that incentive and it made the league look bad. What the league could have done – should have done – was figure out a way to remove, or at least lessen the incentive. However, what they chose to do was punish Philadelphia for taking the bait.
Things like “The Process” happen in business all the time. Someone finds a loophole and exploits it. What smart businesses do is close the loophole. They do not try to distract everyone and hope they forgot about the loophole. Good leadership would understand that once Pandora opens the box there’s no going back to the way things were. The league interjecting the Colangelo family into the Sixers organization was an attempt to build a time machine and get back to the “good old days”. The distraction didn’t work. The Sixers are one of the NBA’s hottest young teams, with a very bright future. The rest of the league understands The Process is partly responsible and many have begun copying Hinkie’s methods. Pandora may be gone, but the box is not.
The NBA viewed Philadelphia as a wayward flock that needed to be corralled. There was a very tempting wild berry bush next to the grazing fields, and the sheep were bound to find it sooner or later. They could’ve chopped down the bush, put a fence around it, or instructed all the shepherds to find a new field. Instead, the Office of Sheep Management encouraged the Sixers to bring in a traditional shepherd with a berries-are-bad philosophy.
Whoever is ultimately responsible for Colangelo’s resignation is not that important. It is merely well deserved comeuppance. People like to think karma is some sort of magical force, but really it is human nature in action. Petty, selfish behavior begets more of the same. If the league had acted properly to begin with, the angle of this Twitter story wouldn’t be quite so juicy, and might have been ignored by journalists. If the Colangelo family did not have the reputation of being company tools, suspicions wouldn’t have been aroused. If the Colangelo’s themselves had a more congenial attitude, there would’ve been less desire to rat them out to The Ringer in the first place.
Sadly for the Hinkie Truthers out there, it is doubtful Sam will ever return of Philadelphia to finish what he started. But that’s OK, because time is shining a positive light on his actions. Fortunately for Sixers fans, the karmic intervention of Eric Jr. will at least mitigate the damage by Colangelo’s, and the league’s, short sighted, “let them eat cake”, way of thinking. Progressive thinking is a wrecking ball; you can try and push it out of the way, but the chain attached is going to make it swing back and cause some damage.
3am Cynic 