The Art of Rebuilding: The Hinkie Process vs The Marks Method
When the Kyrie Irving trade went down there were ramifications all over the show. The Boston Celtics now had a star point guard (sorry, IT) but could he thrive as the main man on a playoff team? Could his hero-balling nature gel with the Brad Steven Celtics philosophy? What about Isaiah Thomas’ back injury, was that another fleecing by Danny Ainge? Does this make either team more competitive against the Golden State Warriors? How much longer do we have to wait for the new damn season!?!
Established teams and players are easy to ponder on, draft picks not so much. Which is why the most fascinating factor of that trade perhaps isn’t that Kyrie thought he’d be happier away from LeBron James but that the Cleveland Cavaliers – in serious danger of losing LeBron James after this season if some people are to be believed – now own the rights to the Brooklyn Nets’ 2018 first rounder. And that the Celtics were ready to part with it.
Granted the Celtics have had no shortage of Brooklyn Nets first rounders over the years. Although of the three first rounders and one pick swap that the Celtics got in the Pierce/Garnett trade, they’ve actually only used two of them:
- 2014 – Celtics draft James Young at 17th overall.
- 2016 – Celtics draft Jaylen Brown at 3rd overall.
- 2017 – Celtics trade down from 1st overall to 3rd in deal with 76ers. Philly picks Markelle Fultz and Boston picks Jayson Tatum.
- 2018 – Celtics send the pick to the Cavs in the Kyrie Trade.
If you were wondering about the Nets’ 2015 selection, they traded that to Atlanta for Joe Johnson back in 2012 as a pick swap. The Hawks picked 15th and took Kelly Oubre Jr. while the Nets picked 29th and took Chris McCullough. The Hawks then traded Oubre on draft day to the Washington Wizards. McCullough spent two years going back and forth between the NBA and D-League before being traded to Washington, of all places, in the Bojan Bogdanovic deal which actually scored the Nets their one first round draft pick of 2017 (they traded the swapped Celtics pick to the Lakers in the D’Angelo Russell move).
Just imagine if the Nets had kept all their own picks over the last five seasons, we’d be talking a team with James Young, Jaylen Brown, Kelly Oubre Jr., Markelle Fultz and potentially the top player in this upcoming class of college players. Alternatively (since that’s not necessarily the sexiest of quartets) swap James Young for Nikola Jokic, who was still on the board, and there you go.
Makes no difference to the Nets though, they knew they weren’t gonna have these picks either way. That’s what’s made Sean Marks’ work in Brooklyn so fascinating from day one – even besides the kiwi connection. Without the use of the one method that the NBA has in place specifically intended to help struggling teams get better they’ve had to be endlessly creative and if the results begin to show then it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Sean Marks might be changing the way people think about the rebuilding process.
Sam Hinkie already did that once. His ultra-analytic, ultra-theoretical, ultra-asset heavy approach to The Process became a meme thanks to Hinkie’s all-in tactics (hey, if you’re gonna do it, you may as well do it on full blast). Yet Marks’ own approach is almost at the complete other end of the scale. His is a method which hasn’t always prioritised culture and fit over raw ability. Kenny Atkinson was hired to be head coach because he could instil a playing style that the franchise felt would be the future of the league – pace, space and three point shooting - and the players they’ve acquired since have mostly been chosen with the intention of fulfilling that.
Of course, Hinkie’s Process and Marks’ Method overlap in all the usual ways – they’re trying to achieve the same goal after all. Both have looked to exploit the trends and inefficiencies in player recruitment and development among the rest of the NBA. That’s meant looking globally for talent and being clever with later draft selections. It’s meant looking to the D-League and spending extra hours in the gym with fringe players working on shot mechanics. It’s meant outside the box coaching and sports science techniques and, in Marks’ case, all that Spursian magic that he picked up from Gregg Popovich – his experience in San Antonio was one of the major factors in his getting this job.
The ultimate point of what Hinkie was doing was sacrificing the present to lift up the future. His theory, and it’s a valid one, was that you don’t challenge for championships in basketball without a superstar player and your best chance of getting one of them lads is through the draft. Ideally with as high a pick as possible. In order for his theory to play out, the Philadelphia 76ers had to lose a ridiculous amount of basketball games.
Sean Marks probably wouldn’t have done that if he had the option but it’s a moot point given the state of the franchise he inherited. They didn’t control their best draft picks so losing wasn’t incentivised for Brooklyn as it was for Philadelphia. Which meant zero compromises in the one area of The Process that was always more troubling than everything else, the one area where the theory clashed most with the actual, you know, process.
You hear athletes say all the time that winning is a habit. By correlation, losing is a habit too then. In Hinkie’s three seasons as 76ers GM the team won only 47 games while losing 199. Three seasons of rank wretchedness but it got them four straight top three draft picks and a host of other selections too. Problem is those players have been integrated into a team for which winning was almost actively discouraged. Coach Brett Brown and the players would tell you they always tried to win every game – which is true – but the roster assembled made that an impossible task. Accountability therefore drops and every mistake gets a little harder to fix.
The Sixers tried to turn the corner last season and while Joel Embiid was healthy it truly looked like they might. Dario Saric was a rookie of the year contender as well. In the end they still went 28-54 though.
Now the task is to take it a step further and push for the playoffs with their young team. Again, it probably depends on the health of guys like Embiid, Fultz and Ben Simmons but crucially they’ve added veterans J.J. Redick and Amir Johnson in free agency which should do wonders for that locker room – you always need a few vets who’ve been there done that before to impart some wisdom. Basically everyone else on that roster right now (other than Jerryd Bayless) entered the league within the last four years. The Minnesota Timberwolves might have a few war stories about how hard it is to turn promise into fulfilment but the 76ers at least have the pieces in place.
Meaning that The Process did what it was supposed to do. The 76ers are stacked for young talent and while Hinkie didn’t last to see it through to this moment (somebody had to be the sacrificial goat for this whole thing), the evidence is there for all to see. They also own the Lakers’ pick for 2018, as well as their own, and a pick swap in 2019 with Sacramento (which both get complicated if the Lakers have to ship their number one to Boston this year).
It took the 76ers five years out of the playoffs and three years with win totals under 20 to get to that point. The Brooklyn Nets were in the playoffs in 2014-15 (to little avail, granted) and Sean Marks has only been in this job about half the time that Hinkie was in his – which doesn’t count time since that Bryan Colangelo has spent remoulding the Sixers into an actual coherent basketball team. Which gives them, say, two more seasons before they need to be where the 76ers are at now.
The Nets were 21-61 two years ago and 20-62 last season. They’ve inherited the Worst Team in the NBA tag but to be fair to them they were almost decent when they were able to call upon both Jeremy Lin and Brook Lopez last term:
Lopez is gone now, an impending free agent who was cashed in for D’Angelo Russell – who if things go right will be the Nets’ version of Joel Embiid. He’s the young player, a #2 pick in 2015, who they hope can emerge as a superstar down the line. And they got him in a large part thanks to the cap space they’d kept available for this very purpose – absorbing Timofey Mozgov’s contract as well as offering the carrots of their 2017 first round pick (swapped from the Celtics and used on Kyle Kuzma) and the expiring deal of old mate Brook Lopez.
They’ve also traded for what they hope will be a resurgent DeMarre Carroll and the restricted FA contract that they initially offered themselves to Allen Crabbe. Two more cap space dependant moves. They did bugger all in free agency but that all still gives them a potential starting five of Russell/Crabbe/Carroll/Booker/Mozgov, with Jeremy Lin, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, Quincy Acy, Caris LeVert and a couple others on the bench. Nothing special but already you can see this roster is a lot steadier than it was not so long ago.
Sean Marks to NY Daily News: “I’m not really, to be honest, focused on the playoffs. We’re obviously making steps in a direction that hopefully everybody can see. We are going younger. We’ve got a youth movement here… Are we happy? Sure. But I think we know we have a long, long way to go.”
Which is one way to sum up the difference between the Marks Method and The Process. One is about bringing up the standard of the worst players and the other is about disregarding those players to get the best ones. Ultimately you need both sides, it’s just that Hinkie worked on his jigsaw puzzle from the inside out and Marks is doing his edge pieces first. Give it a few years and we’ll see if they don’t end up in the same place.
And, if they do, then which approach do you think other GMs are going to follow? The one which involves ripping everything down for three full years or the one which might take an equal amount of time and might not be worth any extra wins but which comes with continuity and commitment and culture and development? Revolution or evolution? The auteur approach or the communal approach?
We’ll find out in a few years.
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