TobiasFunke
Footballguy
Carrol Dawson on how Hinkie was treated by the media and some fans in Philly....
"There was this kid I was in a Front Office with; he was younger than me. Sorta looked up to me, you know. We did our first work together, worked our way out of the arena in Houston. Things were good, we made the most of it. During the Duncan Era, we used analytics to pick off talent and flip them for draft picks... got Dwight Howard...James Harden, too. As much as anyone, I loved him and trusted him. Later on he had an idea to build a championship basketball team out of a two bit East Coast city that was a train stop-over for fans on their way to the Boston Garden. That kid's name was Sam Hinkie, and the team he invented was the Philadelphia 76ers. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque, or a signpost or a statue of him in that town! Someone put a pink slip in his mailbox. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn't angry; I knew Sam, I knew he was head-strong, liked obscure analytics, thought outside the box. So when he turned up fired, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!"
The thread is barely a week old and already everyone else is playing for second place. [Insert Warriors joke here]
just to save you guys the trouble