It is not fair, and never will be, to judge the success or failure of the brief reign of Sam Hinkie with the Sixers, which ended in controversy when Philadelphia hired NBA front-office vets Jerry Colangelo and his son, Bryan, in 2016. That marked the end of The Process, the lose-at-all-costs philosophy Hinkie had installed, one intended to bring the Sixers an array of top draft picks who would, eventually, lead the team to glory.

Hinkie never got the chance to see The Process through. We don’t know how he would have used his trove of draft picks, and we don’t know how many of those picks he might have collected before he was ready to push forward with winning. He had some great successes in the draft, like Joel Embiid and second-rounders Richaun Holmes and Jerami Grant. He had some abject failures, too—Jahlil Okafor comes to mind.

We can guess he would not have, as Bryan Colangelo did, traded up with Danny Ainge and the Celtics to draft Markelle Fultz ahead of Jayson Tatum in 2017. But that, like so many Process retrospectives, that is speculation.

One thing that is not speculation, though, that The Process was always going to exact a toll on those involved. As Doug Collins, who was fired by Hinkie but still defended The Process, once said, losing intentionally is not a bad plan but, “There's a lot of pain that goes with that.”

Hall of Famer Grant Hill, at the time, lamented the Sixers’ lack of drive and veteran leadership. He told me about what Philly was doing: “I just worry that the young players on that team will come up with losing and get used to losing and never really know how to have a winning mindset.”

At this point, it is useful to remember that when the Sixers brought on Colangelo, they did so with the team sitting on a 1-21 record. There was little question about the pain or the prevalence of the losing mindset.

This summer has been one of tumult for the Sixers, following the team’s disappointing ouster in seven games at the hands of the Celtics in the conference semis. Doc Rivers was fired, Nick Nurse was hired and, shockingly, star guard James Harden demanded a trade and initiated scorched-earth warfare with former pal Daryl Morey when no trade emerged.

No one in the above paragraph was directly involved in The Process, and yet, Hill’s warning about a losing mindset hovers above the Sixers’ fray here. The Process seems to have laid the groundwork for a Sixers team that was constructed around two of Hinkie’s big draft prizes—Embiid and 2016 No. 1 pick Ben Simmons—neither of whom has the slightest bit of winning drive on their professional CVs.

Both were coddled early in their NBA tenures, the precious fruits of their predecessors’ hard-earned failure. There were injuries—legitimate injuries, to be clear—that kept Embiid out for this first two seasons and Simmons out for his first year, and in their NBA initiations, both had the opportunity to get comfortable with losing. Embiid watched Philly go 28-136 in his first two seasons on the bench. The Sixers were 28-54 in Simmons’ first year.

The record turned around once Simmons and Embiid got on the floor together, and in that respect, The Process succeeded—talent wins games in the NBA. But the absence of that winning mindset has, repeatedly, shown itself in Philadelphia over the years, especially with Embiid’s postseason struggles.

In a series the Sixers probably should have won in 2019 against eventual champ Toronto, Embiid shot 6-for-18 in Game 7. He played well two years later in another series the Sixers should have won, against Atlanta, with 31 points and 11 rebounds in Game 7, but it was Simmons and in unwillingness to shoot that cost Philadelphia there. Embiid flopped in a close-out game against the Heat (7-for-24 shooting) in 2022, and was ineffective in Game 7 against Boston last year, too (15 points, 5-for-18 shooting, while Tatum, of all people, scored 51).

Simmons, rightfully, has taken plenty of flak for his inability to stay on the floor and his utter lack of offensive aggression when he does play. When he took some criticism about that from his own team—Embiid and Rivers—Simmons’ response was not to hit the gym and come back a much-improved player. It was to sink into himself and hold out for a trade. No winning mindset there, at all.

Maybe no surprise there, either. From the beginning of The Process, there was some warning that the whole thing could produce a band of players who welcomed losing, who were comfortable with the pain of The Process. And, well, here we are.