I think more non-sports (or non-basketball) people should know about Sam Hinkie because he's so emblematic of the cultural moment of the last 10 years.

Like in other US sports leagues (and unlike in, say, the Premier League), the NBA is set up as a theoretically self-correcting system. New players must enter the league through the draft: a process where teams, in order, claim the rights to sign a new player's first contract. The way draft order is assigned is random, but the worst teams get better odds. The idea is that if your team is garbage, you have a higher chance of having an early pick, and so you get to bring on a new player with high potential who can turn your franchise around.

This, of course, creates an incentive to lose. 'Tanking' a season to improve your draft lottery odds is a widespread practice. Nobody is openly throwing games, but a team's general manager might trade away good players for draft picks and field a weak roster. A team's medical staff might suddenly become terribly gun-shy about letting their best players play significant minutes, and so on. The conventional wisdom is that the worst thing you can be in the NBA is mediocre: Not good enough to be one of the small handful of teams that can actually compete for a championship, but not bad enough to get a high lottery pick.

You see, basketball is a high sample rate sport. A typical NBA team experiences over 100 possessions a game. There are more scoring events in a single NBA game than in a Premier League or NFL team's entire season. And NBA teams play a grueling 82-game regular season that leads into four rounds of best-of-seven playoffs. The NFL playoffs are basically just three games. To win the NBA championship, a team has to win a minimum of sixteen games.

The combination of rapid pace and high volume of games played crushes randomness out of the system. You can't spike in basketball. You can't get lucky, at least not enough to propel an inferior team to an unlikely championship. There are no cinderella stories; luck can at best get you a win against a closely-matched opponent.

Basketball is also a game where only five players are on the floor at any one time and everyone plays both offense and defense. Individual players can impact the game enormously. Getting a true star player on the roster - really, multiple stars - is the only realistic way to win a championship; you can't replicate the best players in the league 'in the aggregate' in basketball. And for the most part, drafting these star players is the only realistic way to get them. Basically: you need a Guy, and if you don't have a Guy, your only chance at a championship is by finding one.

So, in the early 2010s, the Philadelphia 76ers - a storied NBA franchise with a lot of past glory - were in exactly this mediocrity purgatory. The team was kind of bad, but not terrible. Attendance was bad. Enthusiasm was low. The team's ownership eventually sold the team to a group of private equity ghouls who wanted to, in their words, 'apply the private equity model to a sports franchise.' Tear everything down to the studs and rebuild.

The guy they hired to do this job was Sam Hinkie, a prototypical nerd-in-a-jock's-world with an MBA from Stanford. He was appointed general manager of the team in 2013 and set about doing exactly that. He traded players for draft picks. He traded players for second-round draft picks; in the NBA, these are usually considered close to worthless (players drafted in the second round only very occasionally amount to anything), but Hinkie hoarded them. He built a team that was basically made up of nothing but rookies and marginal NBA players.

They lost games. They lost lots and lots and lots of games. This made the 76ers' pick really good. Then Hinkie drafted players who couldn't immediately contribute (Joel Embiid, who was injured for his first two years in the NBA and didn't play; Dario Šarić, who was still under contract in Europe and also wouldn't come for two years) and did it all over again. The normal trajectory of a 'rebuilding' team is to be bottom out for a year, maybe two, and then start gradually improving again. Under Hinkie, the Sixers only seemed to get worse.

In the 2015-2016 season they won 10 games. Out of 82, remember. They were only one game better than the worst-ever NBA record. Their roster had basically three guys who were legitimate rotational players. In 2016, Hinkie was forced out, not because his team-building strategy was ineffective (all those lottery picks he accumulated did add up to finding a great player in Joel Embiid) but because everything was falling apart around the team.

Attendance was, of course, catastrophic in Philadelphia. But the sixers, anecdotally, were even depressing attendance in other teams' arenas when they played away games. Hinkie was uninterested in trying to cultivate relationships with anyone in the league. He'd offer young players horrifically team-friendly contracts, preying on their inexperience with the league and the market. He'd blow off agents.

Hinkie had become bad for business, and combined pressure from the league and ownership led to his demise. Hinkie wrote a 13-page manifesto as his resignation letter. He has thus far never returned to an NBA front office role.

But what's fascinating about this whole thing is that some people - mainly younger sixers fans - cheered Hinkie on for this. It's unclear where the phrase started being used by Philly fans, but "trust the process" - ie, be patient and cheer on this horrific tanking in the short term - became a slogan. After Hinkie got pushed out "hinkie died for your sins" became another meme.

And this is fascinating to me. There's this shift from the idea of a sports team as an entertainment product - you tune in to watch Dr J or Iverson dunk on people - to this idea of a sports team as a sort of vector of extremely binary hopes. Basketball fandom for people who don't seem to really like basketball so much as they like the idea that Philadelphia might win another championship (to date, they have not, in the post-Hinkie era).

Winning a championship in the NBA is very unlikely. There are 30 teams, of course. The draft is a crapshoot where players who look transcendent coming into the league often turn into pumpkins. Sometimes the opposite happens: the best player on the current champion (Denver) was drafted late in the second round and there's no footage of him being drafted because it happened during a Taco Bell commercial. And even if you do get a transcendent superstar, there's no guarantee you'll actually capitalize on it; the history of the league is littered with superstar players who never had a decent enough supporting cast to win.

All that Hinkie proposed to do was to play the odds, because there was at no point any guarantee of success. And those odds were only ever marginally better than the odds of just doing whatever. None of the last five championship teams won with a player they picked in the top 4 as their best player, for example.

And yet, a contingent of Philadelphia sports fans consciously chose playing the odds over having a watchable or good basketball team. They were happy with four years of the most catastrophic basketball ever played in their city. Sam Hinkie is a folk hero to these people. I think part of the reason is that in a system that is so chaotic and uncontrollable, where teams depend on transcendent talents to win championships but transcendent talent is handed out basically at random, it feels good to think that at least you're buying as many scratch-off tickets as you can get.

But another part of this phenomenon is that Hinkie is almost like a fan power fantasy. He ran a real basketball team like it was a game of NBA2K franchise mode. He treated players like disposable assets. Arguably, with disastrous consequences for their development - NBA rookies are basically teenagers suddenly getting money and fame, and the 2013-2016 76ers were about as bad an environment for a rookie as there was on the league. The concept of "doing an agent a solid" was not a thing for Hinkie; he acted like every transaction existed in a vacuum, without regard for reputation or relationships, and he treated every one of them like an opportunity to get one over people. He didn't care about attendance, or selling jerseys, or PR, or keeping up the polite fiction that he wasn't tanking.

I think his fundamental myopia was that he acted like the other 29 teams in the league were his mortal enemies in a zero-sum game, and not, like, the people he was in business with.

And it's so emblematic of a certain type of, well, nerd, I think. Hinkie played the game (the system of rules and incentives set up by the draft, the player's union collective bargaining agreement, the tournament structure and so on) but not the game (the political dance of relationships between teams, agents, players, and the League itself). He was a guy with systemic vision but also selective systems blindness. The whole saga is really like, what if a Less Wrong reader got the reins of a professional sports franchise?

Anyway if you enjoyed this post let me know and I might tell you about all the shit that happened after Hinkie left, a series of events that really makes a good case for the idea that the basketball gods are real and they're displeased with Philadelphia.