I have looked at the history of the draft. There is very little correlation between a team's ability to find the best player taken from their pick to the three picks following on a year to year basis. (Example: Because the Timberwolves picked the best player in X year from 5th-8th does that correlate at all with their ability to find the best player in X+1 year.)

The data shows there is little to no correlation for a team's drafting ability year to year.

The draft is way more random than people will ever admit. Y Team made so many great picks because X GM is so smart! Or maybe he got incredibly lucky and got a lot of positive variance. Look at the Seahawks in football. Their GM had a 3 year run of making great picks -- the past few years he has been terrible.

But, our society wants to attribute everything to skill and effort instead of realizing there is a large component of luck involved. You can do something for the right reasons and end up being wrong. And because of that people will crucify you. We are a results driven country -- and that helps in many ways and hurts in others.

Hinkie was self aware and humble in his abilities knowing that drafting is an inexact science. He wanted as many tickets as possible. He did a damn good job.

Gobert is the only one to vastly outperform his draft slot

76ers traded MCW for max value
Jazz kept Kanter (#3 overall pick) right up until the deadline in the final year of his rookie contract then traded him for a lotto protected OKC 1st rounder. it's not a great pick and would have been much worse if KD re-signed.
Jazz kept Burke (#9 overall pick) for three seasons then traded him to Washington for a 2nd rounder.

both of these moves seem average and undeserving of praise

between the great drafting, max value trades, solid contributors and Spursian-ness, this will be Utah's first season in the playoffs since 2011-12

Are you kidding me? Bunch of GMs aren't going to draft a guy with a lottery pick when they have a job to save, he was probably red flagged by half the league

wrt hinkie process, I think having **** teams can also hinder player development alot. You draft these 19 year old kids with expectations that they'll develop, but then you put them in an environment that's not conducive to development. Everyone's influenced by their environment to some degree, even more so when you're 19. You think a player is going to care nearly as much when he's on a 10-40 team vs a team at least in playoff contention? Or when there's no good respectable veterans on the team that they look up to? I'm not just talking about attitude on the court, but putting in work off the court. They're not going to be as motivated to put in those extra training sessions or study film or whatever. It's alot harder to be locked in when your team sucks and you have no shot to win anything. You can see it even with older players like jr smith...he'll be really good or bad depending on how good and disciplined his current team is and how much they can keep him focused.

I look at players like jahlil and noel and feel like they'd be way more developed now if they had been drafted by a decent team. You really are banking on drafting a generational star to come in and change the culture. And this is all besides the fact that you forced people to watch(or probably not watch) the worst product in the league for years.

GMs in that hypothetical wouldn't be worried about their jobs since they are working for Philly though. Like I keep saying, his greatest accomplishment was convincing the front office that he could build a winner if they were given a different set of rules... That alone is awesome, but what he did with it since wasn't imo. And no GM with complete job security and autonomy passes on Embiid there except for a few mouth-breathers, come on now.

This would mean something if Utah's performance this year was typical of an average playoff team. Using them in your context makes it sound as if they are just going to squeek in and have no room for improvement. If this were other years they'd have legit title equity, and as constructed Philly is quite far from where Utah is right now.

imagine if Hinkie was smart enough to not draft 2 centers from 1995 to go along with his other center

GOAT

Why do people keep banging on doing things "the right way", there's no guarantees in any way you chose to go about team building, it's all fraught with tons of luck. I mean, the NBA champs from last season are champs because arguably the best player of all time happened to be born in the state the team is from as has a connection with it, well done to them doing it the RIGHT WAY tho!

Oh and hilarious to read Embiid was the ldo right decision now from people, the same who I'm sure draft night blasted the Sixers. What about doing it the year after they got Noel? HOW COULD THEY DO THIS TO THESE KIDS. Will people ever forgive them? Agents and players have blacklisted them forever!

Are you sure? Seems like jwd even conceded that most ppl on draft night supported the pick of Embiid, gambling on high upside even if acknowledging the high latent bust risk due to injury.

Noel & Embiid would have been fine, especially given their injury troubles. And word is he didn't want Okafor but the owners wouldn't let him take STAPS.

This is what I'm getting at.

If Tim Connelly takes over Hinkie's "process" at the beginning their roster is something like:

Giannis
Embiid
Jokic
Zinger
Mudiay
Gary Harris
lolNurk

If TZ takes over their process their results would have been much better. Hinkie gets credit for doing the obvious, but he doesn't get admonished for making critical blunders?

This is legitimately one of the most ridiculous things you've ever posted.

Also, wasn't Connelly the one who traded Gobert to Utah in the draft? Or let Utah trade up to draft Gobert?

LOL at TC definitely drafting Giannis and Porzingis. If TC knew those guys were as good as they ended up being why didn't he trade up for them. I don't know where you link the Nuggets to Giannis or Porzingis but anything that comes out post draft should be taken with a grain of salt. Danny Ainge had Draymond Green second on his board in the year he was drafted but somehow didn't have the assets to trade for him. Give me a break

I can assure you TC could have traded up for Giannis and I can assure you it wouldn't have been hard to go from 6 to 4 to draft Porzingis. It's confirmation bias. I am sure there were dozens of players TC liked -- many of which weren't good. But, of course he loved Giannis except he never ended up doing anything about it before the results were determined.

Also, how are you getting two picks in the 2015 draft in your hypothetical?

WHAT. He did something literally no GM in NBA history has ever done. The Sixers now have up to 3 (depending on what you think of Simmons/Noel) potential All-Star pieces, Stauskas, who is still just 23 and was the 8th pick and is now playing pretty well, Covington on a sweet deal, all the picks, and all the cap space. It's been just 3.5 years since he took over and he took over a super middling team with no cap space and no assets. And he gets no credit from anyone. But ya, he's no Tim Connelly.

You still don't seem to get it, of course he made mistakes, that's the whole point of taking a ton of swings to get the guy is that you recognise you're not going to draft perfect at every spot and have everything come up as intended. When it comes to Giannis I think you just gotta more tip your hat to Milwaukee than anything else with how they identified him and developed him, how many of those same sort of guys who are super athletes that are really raw with little info available end up coming in and being fails, acting like it was some sort of blunder not to pick him is ludicrous imo.

I tend to think he took Okafor with Embiid being out another season with the intention he could move him if he ended up being the guy he's ended up being, but even if that was the thinking I think it was FPS on his part and has turned out to be a pretty significant mistake, unfortunate he got run out of the league before he got a chance last off season to correct it.

Word is also this. Sounds a lot like a certain team in Central California that doesn't draft guys who refuse to work out for your team.

IDK maybe it's the toxic culture that Philly built in recent years that was the root of this?

Chad Ford is blushing at some of these posts

I don't see how you can say I don't get it when I have vehemently been in favor of the process by design, just not execution.

Denver and Toronto were very public post-draft pre-freak about trying to trade as high as pick #9 for Giannis. The Hawks tried as well but apparently weren't willing to give up as much. It IS a failing of them and the other teams that they took MCW with that pick when at least three other organizations are tried to move up to get him. It's not as bad as say, Marc Cuban, who iirc actually veto'd drafting Giannis, but it's a fail nonetheless. This alone wouldn't be damning, but when you add Staps and some of the others it's pretty egregious, imo.

Except I can't re-write TZ

Thayer and I were lonely on the Staps hype-train to begin with, but everyone was on-board the LOkafor express.

[edit] CPHoya also recognized Kristaps' greatness while others mocked.

The Denver Nuggets traded 27th pick Rudy Gobert to the Utah Jazz in exchange for the 46th pick, Erick Green, and cash.[2]

Will you ever forgive Connelly for his misgivings? Would think with his elite eye to draft perfectly and never miss on a guy this was a pretty egregious mistake.

Please post some articles/quotes immediately following the draft about Giannis. I can only find one article which was posted in March of Giannis' rookie year that said the Raptors tried to trade up for him and the Hawks gave him a promise at 17. There is a difference between liking a player and actually doing something about it. Also, you are being results oriented with MCW. If he developed a jump shot he would have been an All-Star. The pick made sense on many levels.

Instead of waiting around and doing nothing, Hinkie traded MCW at his max value.

Regardless of not drafting perfect and missing guys I'm sure they'd love to have, having Embiid/Simmons, their 1st, the laker 1st, kings swap, kings unprotected in 2019, cap flexibility they still got left in a spot to have every option available to them to succeed even after missing out on guys and making 'egregious' mistakes. People can go on and list every mistake they made and it still doesn't change the fact that the position they ended up in is an incredibly envious one.

No I will not I was a writer for the largest Nugs blog at the time and stepped down after going on a rant about firing Connelly (he had been there two weeks) . It was mostly about giving Koufos away for nothing, which ironically is now something now that the game has changed.. Plus it paved the way for Mozgov to sign a ridiculously cheap deal and get traded for 2 firsts.

Anyway a year or so later he was on our podcast and talked about how he only had one guy, Giannis, in his sites and after that traded the pick. Apparently (I wasn't in the room at the time so I can't confirm but he did talk about it), they had only scouting around picks 6-10 (he was working for NOP as a scout/asst GM right before getting hired) and were leaning towards the freak. It's actually damning of the Nugs org in general that they had literally NO FO or coach right before draft day, and I've since given all of Timmy's first year blunders a pass because he literally had nobody but himself at the draft and then lost Iggy a few weeks later. Everything he's done since then has been tip-top imo.

Connelly >>> Me > Hinkie

Connelly's was on a Colorado SPorts Guys podcast I may be able to get, Atlanta's I'll try and find.

so, 4 centers, Giannis, Mudiay and Harris

and you criticize the 6ers for having an excess of 5s in Embiid-Noel-Okafor?

Also can't believe you don't see how flawed it is to say "ya what Hinkie did was sweet, but imagine if he did that AND didn't make x mistakes". To assume any GM would have gone in and done the stuff he did along with avoiding his mistakes is just absolutely insane to me. It's actually kind shocking that it's something I have to argue against.