Hi again everyone. Today marks the start of the last week of blogs! We’re just under £100 off our target for the month, so if you’re keen on helping out here’s the link. The nice thing about The Water Project is that every big donation (like the one we’re making) is directly linked to helping a specific community, so we can actually see in practice where our money is going and who it’s helping. I think that’s pretty lovely — if the five of us get any updates after the month is over, we’ll share them on our social media I’m sure.
A few days ago I wrote a blog entry called ‘Spite Gone Wrong’ telling the story of a superstar basketball player who sniped at his critics by creating a second Twitter account under a different name and replying to all of the hate mail he received, only to be caught out. I neglected to mention that there’s an even bigger story of Spite Gone Wrong which preoccupied the sporting world a couple of years ago which I think is absolutely hilarious. Strap in.
The Philadelphia 76ers are a basketball team who, until fairly recently, had been intensely focused on being as absolutely awful as possible. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the NBA gives the worst teams a helping hand by allowing them to have the first choice of the best young players in the world every year in the NBA Draft, and so in 2013 the new 76ers’ general manager Sam Hinkie hatched a plan. “If I get rid of literally every single useful player on the team and make us shit,” he thought, “then surely at some point we’ll strike gold with our choice of promising young player and then we’ll eventually be amazing!” This absolutely bonkers strategy became affectionately known as ‘tanking’.
It was certainly one way of going about finding success. It was also a remarkably nihilistic one. The problem is twofold. Firstly, as you may already imagine, it’s not great for fans to have to watch the team they adore get absolutely pummelled game after game for 4 years straight. Secondly, there can be no guarantee that the young players you end up with are actually gonna be good in the Big Leagues. These problems aren’t helped by the fact that Hinkie, the mastermind behind this operation, is the most unappealing person you can imagine to the average basketball fan who just wants to open up a Budweiser and see some Good Ol’ Sports. He has a slimy, untrustworthy face, and when he does press interviews he talks in long, labyrinthine sentences about ‘draft strategy’ and ‘statistical analysis’, all of which was very little solace for the 76ers loyalists watching their team break the NBA record for the longest ever losing streak. In Hinkie’s third year running the ship, the Philadelphia 76ers won 10 out of 82 games. It was absolutely mental. One quote pretty aptly summarises Hinkie’s philosophy:
“Some would have us go out and buy apples. But we want to build the whole orchard… you don’t get to the moon by climbing a tree.”
Hinkie did have his supporters here and there, such as the poet above. One high-profile fan of the short-term-pain-for-long-term-pleasure strategy was Joel Embiid, a 7-foot-tall superstar who was one of these aforementioned brilliant young players who the 76ers got their hands on by virtue of being terrible. Embiid has a wicked sense of humour, and is the embodiment of everything Hinkie prioritises. When he was selected by the 76ers aged just 20, Hinkie didn’t seem to care that he had a broken foot which would prevent him from even playing for the better part of a year. After all, it’s all about the future! To show his gratitude for the faith placed unto him, Embiid nicknamed himself ‘The Process’ in homage to Hinkie’s repeated pleas to the general public to just “trust the process”. When Donald Trump was elected President in November 2016, Embiid poked a little bit of fun at the whole scenario as only he can.
In 2016, after slowly mounting frustration that his role was being diminished, Sam Hinkie resigned. The story of his eventual replacement, Bryan Colangelo, is one of Spite Gone Wrong. It’s amazing.
Colangelo’s dad, Jerry, had been working at the team for a few months already and immediately pushed Hinkie closer and closer to the door in order to all too predictably replace him with his son. It was a horrible piece of nepotism and, seemingly, the intrinsic knowledge that he didn’t really deserve the job as general manager made Bryan Colangelo fairly paranoid and jealous. It was his job to oversee the fruits of the Hinkie’s labour — they finally had a really good young team by this stage, after many years of suffering — but Colangelo’s total ineptitude at managing a basketball team meant they squandered this golden period. I think he knew that, deep down inside, he didn’t really have what it takes.
Our friend Joel Embiid would mock him on social media. Serious sports pundits would question his ability to build a coherent and consistent squad of players. The 76ers would play well and rack up plenty of wins against shite teams, but as soon as things got serious they’d almost always collapse. All the same, most people were optimistic even in spite of Colangelo’s incompetence. The team were still young, and they’d been slowly improving year on year.
But then May 29th, 2018 happened. Sports website The Ringer published a stunning exposé which showed how five different Twitter accounts with almost no followers and eerily similar characteristics were all linked to Bryan Colangelo. The accounts would constantly critique current players such as Embiid for not showing enough effort and being disrespectful, and mock Sam Hinkie for his silly losing plan. The previous November, a 76ers fan had posted an innocent tweet pointing out the abnormally large size of Colangelo’s shirt collars. One of the accounts now alleged to be linked to The Man Himself responded furiously:
FIND A NEW SLANT. The night where these accounts were revealed, Twitter went absolutely insane and searched through their history of tweets. One account had tweeted that “Joel (Embiid) was blessed by God with a special talent, now he needs to grow up.” Let’s not forget that the person alleged to have written this tweet was Embid’s boss!!! (I should add, too, that an older white person saying a younger black athlete is ungrateful for their talent is a century-old racist trope which diminishes both the athlete and their hard work and determination in getting where they are, despite it being in no way different from the many white players who are routinely applauded for their dedication.) Another had tweeted: “I feel like Hinkie has been thrown down my throat at every single turn to a degree of unacceptable extremism that makes me resent him.” Another had disclosed private medical information about a player on the 76ers who was plagued by injuries. Another had lauded Donald Trump for his introduction of the Muslim Ban. Oh dear.
A few days later, someone had the bright idea to try to do a Password Reset on each of the five accounts, because Twitter send you a prompt that you’ll be able to reset the password by clicking the link on a text sent to your phone number, and show you what number that is. The phone numbers for each of the accounts were all the same. It was him. Less than a week later, Bryan Colangelo resigned.
I think Embiid’s tweet from the night the news broke sums things up well. So, how do we reflect on this one? The first thing that pops into my head is that, clearly, nepotism is bad and just leads to a lot of awkwardness, poor job performance, and insecurity. Secondly, I think the story of Sam Hinkie is a pretty beautiful one. He was ridiculed for the three years when he was in charge, only to be vindicated by Joel Embiid being an actual basketballing god and by his successor completely shitting the bed. For the upcoming NBA season, the Philadelphia 76ers are one of the favourites to win the championship. I’m happy for Hinkie. As for Colangelo, I suppose it’s just another lesson that spite gets you nowhere.
