April 16, 2015
As much as we talk about Sam Hinkie and Brett Brown as the faces of The Great Rebuild, none of this happens without Josh Harris. Hinkie isn’t the first basketball executive to draw up this specific plan of attack the Sixers are taking, but he’s one of the select few that were given the green light to carry it out.
“The way we run the team is similar to how I do my day job, which is you hire the absolute best people you can find, you give them resources, and then you hold them accountable for their decisions,” Harris said yesterday before the Sixers’ season-ending 105-101 loss to Miami.
Detractors of Harris’ stewardship argue that it’s impossible to hold the Sixers’ front office accountable, at least in the traditional sense. They’re correct. The Sixers have been terrible on the floor the last two years, but that’s exactly how they drew it up. They want to be bad more than Willa Ford, which makes evaluating them impossible in the short term. The most popular question at yesterday’s media availability was some version of, “When do you expect the team to start contending?” Loosely translated, this means, “When are you going to start acting like a real team so we can hold you accountable?”
“It certainly is not a negative that I think the team has increased in value, but we really bought this team to create something in Philly that our partners, the city, and our families could be proud of,” Harris said. “And that means winning.”
And every single time, Harris responded to the question with the same answer Hinkie always has: He doesn’t know.
“I use a driving analogy,” Harris said about how he holds everyone in his organization accountable. “If they’re driving on the road, they can make the decision. If they drive off the road, you say no. And if you don’t like the way they’re driving, you bring in someone else. Generally, that’s the way that we run our companies at Apollo, that’s the way David [Blitzer] and I run the team, and that’s how we’ve been able I think to attract the best people."
Alright, so not a great analogy, or at the very least one that wasn’t clearly expressed. The gist of what Harris is trying to say there is that he gets out of his basketball people’s way and lets them do their thing. I believe he has the right approach, as nothing good typically comes from meddling owners. Creative freedom is a powerful drug that front office types crave, and pressure from ownership to reach arbitrary benchmarks as soon as possible can torpedo a team’s future. I saw a great example of this on Twitter last night:
Ownership gave GM Dell Demps and Monty Williams preseason mandate to make playoffs to keep jobs, w/ no allowance for injuries. They made it.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) April 16, 2015
Like, are you freaking serious? Think about that for a second: If Anthony Davis doesn’t knock down the shot of the year and New Orleans wins 44 games as opposed to 45, the owner’s entire outlook on his coach and GM would’ve completely changed. Now that the Pelicans earned the right (benefitted from brutal Thunder injury luck) to get their doors blown off by Golden State in the first round, Monty Williams and Dell Demps’ jobs are reportedly safe. It’s precisely the type of thinking that locked Anthony Davis into a so-so supporting cast for at least the near future. Either they’re your guys and you’re confident in them or not.
New Orleans lucked into the superstar, which is the hard part. Landing The Brow is like hitting a homer and triple at the same time if your goal is hitting for the cycle. The Sixers are still in search of that guy. Maybe they already have him in-house (Joel Embiid) and maybe the lottery gods deliver him this year, but Harris made clear that he doesn’t want to stop at one star. He’s legitimately looking to build the Oklahoma City Thunder prior to the James Harden trade.
“We’re going to continue to try to add elite NBA players,” Harris said. “And like we’ve said all along, the way you win [big, he means "win big"] in the NBA is to have at least two, but hopefully four Top-20 NBA players. And they’re hard to get.”
Star players are really hard to get, which is why he can’t give an answer as to when (or if, truthfully) the Sixers will get them. Backtracking a little bit, I thought it was interesting that Harris brought up his real job a couple of times. Fair or not, someone with a background in private equity makes people uneasy, which is partly the reason this strip-it-down strategy is so controversial.
In fairness to Harris, he didn’t come into the NBA with a “my way or the highway” attitude. For the first two seasons, he sat on the sidelines and allowed Doug Collins/Tony DiLeo to run the team as they saw fit. After a disastrous season following the Andrew Bynum trade, he decided to change course.
“It certainly is not a negative that I think the team has increased in value, but we really bought this team to create something in Philly that our partners, the city, and our families could be proud of,” Harris said, trying to push back against the idea that all he cares about is the team’s finances. “And that means winning.”
Well, losing first and then hopefully winning. Fully aware of the patience he’s asking from the fans, Harris made it a point to thank Philadelphia as a whole. This probably wasn’t necessary. Sure, if he were doing this with the Eagles, the National Guard would be on-call in Philly at all times. Sixers fans are different, though, as they exist more in pockets. Someone noted that the team is last in NBA attendance, but it’s not like he broke up a consistently great crowd. Philly finished in the bottom third in attendance for eight of the previous nine years.
“The city understands, as we think, that we’re on the way up,” Harris said.
The owner’s characterization of his fanbase as a whole may or may not be true, but the Sixers need to go all the way up for the whole city to deeply care. That happens to be right where Harris is aiming.
