As always seems to be the case with the Sixers, there is a lot to unpack from draft night: subplots, short-term questions, long-term questions, other minutiae, etc. The works. In the following days and weeks, count on there being ample time for that.
Listening to general manager and president of basketball operations Sam Hinkie talk approximately 15 hours after making the third overall pick, the most obvious question was also the most interesting: Even if Jahlil Okafor can figure out his defensive issues to the point where he becomes the professional version of the dominant player he was at Duke as a 19-year-old freshman, how in the world can you proceed with him, Nerlens Noel, and Joel Embiid on the same team?
The answer, which isn’t really an answer, was a predictable one. It would’ve been more fun if the mild-mannered Hinkie stood up on the podium, started pounding his chest like Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and chanted, “BPA, BPA, BPA!” The message wouldn’t have changed all that much.
“The situation where we find ourselves, we say, ‘We need to add the highest-level talent we can and we need to add someone who can really move us forward and someone who can really be an enormous piece for us,’” Hinkie said.
“We were very clear going into the draft and honestly very clear for the last few years that we’d take the best available player, whoever that was,” Hinkie said. “We think history is on our side there.”
The largest piece to the puzzle, both physically and symbolically, is probably Joel Embiid, who was a part of the organization 12 months before Okafor but will make his official Sixers debut after him. Hinkie confirmed what already felt like a foregone conclusion: Embiid likely won’t play in summer league after suffering a setback in the rehab of his right foot.
The Sixers haven’t released an official update on the next course of action for Embiid, though Hinkie indicated one could be coming soon. The combination of the seven-footer being unable to get on the floor a calendar year after the initial surgery and a second surgery not being ruled out as an option is worrisome to put it mildly.
“We had one more precautionary [CT scan] that was largely the pre-summer league one, and we had that and it looked different,” Hinkie said. “We had no symptoms. He doesn’t have any pain. It hasn’t really been bothering him. He had been many weeks without any soreness, and it looked different. It caused the surgeon to say, ‘That’s different, what is that? Let’s get to the bottom of this.’ That’s the thing we’ve been working on.”
Hinkie wasn’t kidding about Embiid not feeling any pain. This video was apparently taken yesterday, and fair or not, it almost immediately got compared to the Andrew Bynum bowling fiasco. A little off-topic, but I really want to ride one of those things:
Embiid’s murky future makes the Sixers even more of a mystery because of the three bigs, he’s the most complete player. Okafor brings elite offense to the table while Noel offers elite defense, but Embiid has both. When the Sixers selected him last year with the same third pick they used on Okafor Thursday night, there is no doubt he was the best player available. After watching the rest of the lottery picks play their rookie seasons, that point was only reinforced. It’s now a matter of getting him on the floor and keeping him there, which seems questionable at best.
In Okafor’s case, the jury is still out if he was in fact the best player available. He certainly was the highest-rated player on the board, one most experts thought was ticketed for Los Angeles until the eleventh hour. When asked whether Embiid’s health affected his draft strategy, Hinkie wasn’t as steadfast as some might expect.
“I’d like to think we would’ve had the courage to do it anyway,” Hinkie said of selecting Okafor. “I really do. It’s kind of hard to know because it’s hard to un-know where things stood with Joel.”
Courage is an interesting word choice. Hinkie comes off as the type that doesn’t like to attach emotion to his decisions, but maybe it’s simply meant as an acknowledgment that Embiid’s condition is truly as unpredictable as it seems from the outside. The calculus in the draft might have changed if there were more confidence in the health of a twin towers frontline, which prompts team-building discussion and questions of how far ahead Okafor actually was on Hinkie’s mysterious draft board.
For today, Hinkie was talking about possible fits that seem problematic on paper. Specifically, he mentioned how Noel’s ability to move his feet defensively and how Embiid’s intriguing jumper/face-up game could work in tandem with Okafor and force opponents into trouble.
“I spent so much time in Durham, North Carolina this year,” Hinkie said. “If you would’ve told me part way through that we would get him, we would’ve slept a lot more in the interim along the way.”
One defensive specialist trying to refine his offense. One offensive specialist who enters the league with huge question marks on defense. One guy that can do everything besides make it on the court. Oh yeah, and they all play the same position. If Embiid is healthy, Noel’s late-season offensive improvement continues, and Hinkie’s comments about Okafor using verticality to protect the rim become prescient, a jumbled fit wouldn’t obscure a very promising frontcourt. If none of those things happen, well, yeah.
“We were very clear going into the draft and honestly very clear for the last few years that we’d take the best available player, whoever that was,” Hinkie said. “We think history is on our side there.”
Now it’s up to Okafor to prove he was the best player available, but bringing up historical precedent in any context is the one area I strongly disagree with Hinkie. There hasn’t ever been anything like this before.
Follow Rich on Twitter: @rich_hofmann