March 01, 2025
Bill Streicher/Imagn Images
Joel Embiid and former Sixers general manager Sam Hinkie back in 2014.
If you are a Sixers fan, odds are your first move after learning that Joel Embiid's season was officially over on Friday afternoon was to head over to Tankathon.com, the preeminent resource for all information related to the NBA Draft Lottery. From mock drafts to a lottery simulator to advanced breakdowns of the odds handed out to each team based on their place in the standings, Tankathon has established itself as an all-knowing entity for anything pertaining to the draft and lottery, giving hope to fans of rudderless teams.
Back in 2013, Matt Hoover was in despair. A die-hard Chicago Bulls fan, Hoover watched as hometown product and franchise cornerstone Derrick Rose suffered his second catastrophic injury. What Hoover wanted more than anything else was for the Bulls to tank in an effort to land a new star with a premium draft choice. He grew tired of reversing the standings on ESPN and manually calculating where the team would fall in the lottery.
Hoover, who had just learned to code, decided to embark on a project. At first, it was merely a representation of the lottery standings (playoff standings in reverse order). Then came mock drafts associated with the projected draft orders, and eventually a mock draft simulator anyone could use with just the click of a button. Now, each simulation can come along with a mock draft based on the order netted by said simulation. Tankathon, as the website became known, began to grow in popularity, but Hoover never imagined it becoming mainstream in any capacity.
Suddenly, Tankathon's popularity began skyrocketing in the middle of the 2010s -- thanks in large part to a rabid fanbase trying to remain optimistic about a team that was not winning a whole lot of games. As new general manager Sam Hankie took over the Sixers and initiated a plan that included multiple years of bottoming out, many ardent supporters took to investing their time into monitoring the organization's draft equity.
"The early Hinkie years, Sixers fans really powered the site," Hoover told PhillyVoice in a phone interview on Thursday. "They were by far the biggest and most interested fan base for years early on... [In terms of] traffic versus city size, Philadelphia has been the number one city for the site overall."
MORE: Sixers tank watch 1.0: Can the team climb higher in the lottery?
Fast forward nearly a dozen years after Hinkie was hired, almost 10 years since he was exiled and many iterations of Sixers teams later, fans in Philadelphia now find themselves flocking back to Tankathon. But a lot has changed for Hoover since then: Tankathon has amassed many more features, tank-themed merchandise and tens of millions of yearly page views, not to mention similarly detailed tabs for the NFL, NHL, WNBA and MLB. (Hoover said his NFL section of the website draws the most traffic now.)
Hoover is completely appreciative of the irony of all of this. The crown jewel of the Sixers' multi-year tanking effort, which he and many others latched onto a decade ago, was Embiid. Now news of Embiid's shutdown is what will surely explode the number of clicks Tankathon receives from folks in the Philadelphia area. Hoover said on Thursday that traffic in Philadelphia had already more than doubled what it had looked like at the same time last year, and that is sure to increase dramatically in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Sixers fans, as Hoover succinctly and painfully described it, are now "back in the comfort zone in a way." And while this group does not represent the entirety of the fan base, there is a very large and very vocal segment of Sixers fans which once relished the opportunity to brag about a treasure chest of future assets and dream about the future ahead, with no care in the world for the outcomes of the games on the television screen. For at least the next few months, that is life again for those fans -- and despite his Chicago fandom, Hoover is among them.
THE HINKIE SWAP EXECUTES!
— Tankathon.com (@tankathon) May 17, 2017
There is plenty of draft lottery lore as it pertains to the Sixers over the last decade. The pick swap with the Sacramento Kings in 2017 incited incredible excitement from Hinkie's supporters years after his exit, enabling the Sixers to leapfrog to No. 3 in that year's draft. (Of course, they then traded that No. 3 pick to move up to No. 1, selected Markelle Fultz in the top slot and watched the rival Boston Celtics select Jayson Tatum third.) There was the lottery the year prior, in which the Sixers endured a hellish 10-72 season to attain the top odds in the lottery, and netted the first pick to select a prodigy named Ben Simmons, who was already drawing comparisons to LeBron James and Magic Johnson.
This time, though, the Sixers are at genuine risk of a uniquely horrid season netting them zero reward in the first round of the draft. Sixers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey's first move upon taking over the team in 2020 was to shed Al Horford's three remaining years under contract, sending a top-six protected 2025 first-rounder alongside Horford to the Oklahoma City Thunder in exchange for Danny Green.
And now, in 2025, that has shockingly come into play. The Sixers currently have the sixth-worst record in the NBA, putting them right on the borderline of coming up empty and having the opportunity to add one of the many gifted young players in what is believed to be a terrific draft class, with Duke's Cooper Flagg leading the way.
Here is what the Sixers' chance of keeping their top-six protected first-round pick will be depending on where they land in the draft lottery. They're No. 6 right now, a game ahead of No. 7 BKN and 2.5 games behind No. 5 TOR.
— Adam Aaronson (@SixersAdam) February 28, 2025
From Wed... TANK WATCH 1.0:https://t.co/TylrgEPcU9 pic.twitter.com/nrPs1uuNvi
Sixers fans began this season expecting their team to compete for a championship. That it has devolved into a tanking race is an absolutely stunning twist which can only signal that cataclysmic events have taken place. A decade ago, Hinkie was in the process of implementing a plan that sparked enthusiasm among parts of the fan base (and was detested by others). His most passionate of supporters helped Hoover turn Tankathon into a mainstream resource so significant that last April, Hoover quit the software job he had started around the time he created the website and had been working for a decade. Running Tankathon is now his full-time job.
"I have an affinity for the Sixers just because of 'The Process' and the commitment to tanking there early on, which was huge for the site, and the Sixers' fans passion on Twitter and on the site for 'The Process' and everything around it," Hoover said.
Hoover proudly pointed out that Tankathon's social media bio still concludes with the following sentence: "Someone give Sam Hinkie a job." Well, one could argue that Hinkie enabled Hoover to find a job he never could have expected to be working in his wildest dreams.
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