I’d spent the previous year working on a book about the Sixers that focused on Hinkie and his polarizing team-building strategy, which involved assembling a losing squad in the short term to get big wins in the future. Hinkie’s data-driven devotion to tanking had given Philadelphia a shot at greatness, and raised all sorts of interesting questions about team building in professional sports.

But the strategy—known as “the Process”—had taken a toll on the team, including Hinkie himself. We’d spoken a couple times on the phone, but we’d never met. He had declined, on multiple occasions, to be interviewed for my book. “I don’t have any interest or willingness to quote-unquote shape a legacy,” he told me in an early phone call.

Hinkie was hired by the Sixers in May 2013. He was just 36 years old and, unlike the majority of his peers, his on-court career had ended after high school. But he had an MBA from Stanford, and experience in management and private equity. He thought and spoke like a finance guy, so it wasn’t a coincidence that the private equity billionaires who had purchased the Sixers in 2011 took a liking to him. He represented a fresh hope.

The Sixers had once been home to NBA greats like Wilt Chamberlain, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Charles Barkley and Allen Iverson. But the franchise had spent much of the decade before Hinkie’s arrival trapped in NBA purgatory. They were not good enough to compete for a championship but not bad enough to scoop up the high draft picks which the league, in an effort to promote parity, hands to its worst performing teams. The Sixers were mired in mediocrity on the court, and it was hurting their bottom line. They ranked in the league’s bottom-third of attendance in 2009, 2010, and 2011, despite playing in the country’s fifth-largest metro area.

Hinkie saw a way out: He’d build a team to lose. He wasn’t the first to employ such a strategy, but, as one NBA general manager told me, “he went further than anyone else.” To Hinkie, the math was simple. He knew that five teams had combined to win 20 of the previous 23 NBA titles, and that these teams had monopolized the titles because they each had multiple stars on their rosters—Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal of the Lakers, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James of the Miami Heat. He also knew that, typically, star players spent the majority of their careers playing for the teams that had originally drafted them and that these types of players were typically selected early in the draft.

If the best chance to win a championship was by acquiring a superstar, and if the best chance to acquire a superstar was by landing a high draft pick, then, Hinkie’s thinking went, the Sixers’ best chance at succeeding would involve acquiring as many high draft picks as possible. Since the worst teams get the highest drafts, Hinkie believed it would pay to be bad for multiple years.

Few leaders in the history of sports have ever so willingly and aggressively sacrificed the present in order to chase a better future. Less than two months into the job Hinkie traded his team’s best player, All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday, for a pair of draft picks. A year later, Hinkie dealt Michael Carter-Williams, the reigning Rookie of the Year, for yet another future pick. He also used the Sixers’ two first round picks on a pair of players who wouldn’t suit up for two more seasons: a University of Kansas center named Joel Embiid, who had recently suffered a fractured foot; and a Croatian forward named Dario Saric, whose deal with a Turkish team would keep him overseas for at least two more seasons.

Hinkie didn’t stop there. Veterans were shipped out. Salary cap space was left unused, infuriating the players’ union. Hinkie never instructed his coaches to lose games; given the roster he handed them, he hardly needed to. Two years into Hinkie’s tenure, the Sixers had amassed a war chest of draft picks unlike anything the league had ever seen.

But this zero-sum, McKinsey-like approach blinded Hinkie to the subtler aspects of the job. The Process triggered all sorts of anger, from all sorts of parties. Some fans viewed Hinkie as a scam artist running a dirty game of three-card monte, a man in violation of professional sports’ Golden Rule: You play to win the game. NBA commissioner Adam Silver was furious that one of the league’s 30 teams was so willing to damage the NBA brand. Sixers business executives and opposing owners were irked about being forced to sell a subpar product to fans.

“It’s not complicated,” Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry told me. “No one likes coming to see a horrible team.”

Hinkie’s biggest misstep, though, might have been writing off the complexities of his players. He left the vital work of relationship-building and player development to others. He rarely attended team practices, believing it was important to build a wall between himself and the coaching staff since they had conflicting priorities (Hinkie didn’t want to win games, and the coaches did). A culture of accountability was never created. Embiid, whose 13-year-old brother was tragically killed during his rookie year, would blow off rehab sessions and ignore medical advice. Another young draft pick, Nerlens Noel, who had grown up in an environment surrounded by adults trying to leverage his talents into their own rewards, would often show up late for practices and team flights.

Then there was Jahlil Okafor, a player out of Duke University who Hinkie selected for the Sixers using the third pick in the 2015 draft. Okafor was a prized prospect. He was massive—nearly 6-foot-11 and about 275 pounds—with huge hands, deft feet, a soft touch, and a full arsenal of post moves. But he had internal demons that he’d yet to confront.

One day, when he was 9 years old, Okafor was sitting in his living room watching BET when his mother started coughing. Okafor laughed. He thought she was joking. She gasped for air. Okafor laughed again. His mother kept wheezing, each breath more labored and painful than the one before. Finally, Okafor realized something was wrong, but his call to 911 was too late. One of his mother’s lungs had collapsed, and she died in the hospital that night.

Okafor was crushed. “Even now,” he would tell a reporter while in high school, “I still have to think, ‘What if I could have known right off the bat that she wasn’t playing? She would still be here.’” But it wasn’t until he entered the NBA that his emotions manifested themselves in dangerous ways. During his rookie year, he began frequenting bars. One night a stranger in a parked car pulled a gun on him; another evening, someone filmed Okafor stumbling around streets, cursing out onlookers. TMZ aired the footage the next day.

The story embarrassed the league and served as the final straw for Sixers ownership, who soon brought in Jerry Colangelo, a longtime basketball executive, to work above Hinkie and right the ship. The Sixers offered Hinkie the opportunity to stay on as an executive. He declined—and then surprised his bosses by submitting an elaborate 13-page resignation letter, with subsections paying homage to famous investors like Charlie Munger that cemented his reputation as both an eccentric and an ideologue. “What Sam did, the principles he showed, the loyalty to those principles, it takes a really special person,” one of his friends from within the NBA once told me.

And yet, despite the missteps, the Process basically worked. The Sixers, now nearly seven years since Hinkie’s hiring, find themselves near the top of the NBA. All those losses and high draft picks netted two young superstars, the aforementioned Embiid and Ben Simmons, and the team has become a playoff mainstay. This season, before the COVID-19 NBA shutdown, the Sixers led the league in attendance. Forbes recently valued the franchise at $2 billion, about four times its purchase price in 2011.

To many, Hinkie’s unwavering pursuit of efficiency is something worthy of both praise and emulation, the kind of thing that gets held up in classrooms and boardrooms as an ideal. These days, Hinkie spends his time in Silicon Valley, teaching at Stanford and raising millions of dollars for his venture capital firm.

But there’s one more lesson to take from the Process, one that Hinkie’s acolytes often miss.

Hunting and exploiting market inefficiencies may be sound business, no matter what field, and especially in a cutthroat multi-billion-dollar world like the NBA. And the Sixers, thanks to Hinkie’s work, are no doubt positioned better than they were before.

But when you stop looking at things in black and white—asking simplistically, Are we better than we were before?—and instead consider the full-color range of reactions the approach triggered, the truth that Hinkie’s calculations all missed reveals itself: People aren’t widgets. They’re complicated and irrational and emotional. They have egos. They have pasts. They’re unpredictable. They can surprise. They can disappoint. Not only is treating them like assets amoral; it’s also bad business.

That Hinkie inherited a middling team and turned it into a contender will always be part of his legacy. So will the fact that his mishandling of people led to his tenure, and the Process, being cut short.

The post Building an NBA Team to Lose appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Go back home to Ohio, LeBron James.

Yes, as a fan, I’m happy to see the world’s greatest basketball player relocate to California and join my favorite team, the Los Angeles Lakers.

But as a Californian, I fear LeBron is the last thing our state needs.

His arrival is a high-profile symptom of one of our state’s big problems: California tends to favor flashy outsiders who are older, proven, and wealthy over our young, homegrown compatriots who haven’t succeeded yet.

Comparing LeBron to his young new teammate, point guard Lonzo Ball, demonstrates the problem—and shows that the stakes for the state go beyond whether the Lakers can deny the Golden State Warriors another championship.

In recent decades, California has been very good at recruiting people like LeBron, who received a $154 million, four-year contract to leave his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and to revive a losing Lakers squad. A Stanford study shows that, despite its high taxes on the wealthy, the Golden State attracts more millionaires than it loses, since one advantage of being rich is not having to worry too much about taxes or other costs when you’re deciding where to live.

The trend holds even among those who are merely upper-middle-class. People moving to California have more education (the state has seen net gains in graduate degree holders) and income ($110,000 annually or more) than the average Californian. They need the money to afford our expensive housing.

But, at the same time, California has been struggling to develop and retain people like Lonzo Ball, a 20-year-old L.A. native who grew up in the Inland Empire community of Chino Hills. Younger Californians who were born and raised here have struggled to find their footing and have been leaving the state for cheaper places like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. This is especially true for those who make less than $55,000 a year, don’t have college degrees (like Lonzo, who attended UCLA for just one year before joining the NBA), or want to start families.

Lonzo himself may be on his way out the door; the sports media are reporting that he could be traded in exchange for older and proven players who can help LeBron win now.

This makes sense in 2018, when LeBron is far superior to Lonzo. But in the long term, LeBron’s value to Lakers could be less than Lonzo’s. LeBron, at age 33, is old for a pro basketball star, and he is likely to be injured and in decline, perhaps ready to retire, by the time his new contract expires in 2022. In contrast, if Lonzo realizes his potential, he could help the Lakers win games into the 2030s.

At this point, I’ll leave the basketball debate to the hoops experts. But in the larger context of California’s changing demography, the Lonzos are indisputably more important to our state’s future than the LeBrons.

That’s because so many more of us are Lonzos.

This Lonzo-ization of California represents a sea change. From the Gold Rush until 2010, we were mostly a state of LeBrons—people who had migrated here from some other state or country. As a state, we were very much like the Lakers, traditionally a franchise dependent on free agents from elsewhere, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, and Shaquille O’Neal. There were great advantages to our free agent past; California didn’t have to develop as many of our own taxpayers by paying for their schooling and health care, because so many of our people just showed up from someplace else.

But in this decade, as immigration levels have fallen, we’ve become a state of Lonzos.

Now, more than 54 percent of Californians were born and raised here. Most of our adults are originally from someplace else. But Lonzo’s rising cohort of millennials is so homegrown—at more than 70 percent—that it will be California’s first homegrown generation.

With this shift, California needs to develop and educate more of its own young people, so that they can replace the immigrant entrepreneurs who have been responsible for starting so many of our innovations and businesses. “Homegrown Californians are the anchor of our economic future,” Dowell Myers, the USC demographer who has detailed the rise of the “homegrown majority,” has said.

In other words, we desperately need our Lonzos to succeed. Too many haven’t. Some are leaving the state. And those who are staying are contributing to our highest-in-the-nation poverty rate. Education levels have stagnated among California’s young—a huge problem since today’s youth will have to be more economically productive to support our aging population.

Yes, the LeBrons of California help subsidize the Lonzos by paying taxes under our progressive system. But the LeBrons also retard the growth of the young. Arriving LeBrons help run up the price of housing—LeBron already has two homes in L.A.—making it harder for Lonzos to buy houses and start families.

The LeBrons of the world tend to be expensive—and less innovative, since younger people are responsible for most inventions. Even more important, California’s Lonzos are far more loyal to the state; they are about three times more likely to stick around California and make their lives. When LeBron tires of his new Hollywood friends Leo DiCaprio and Al Pacino, with whom he recently lunched, he can go back home to Ohio. But Lonzo’s family—including a father who may be sabotaging his career (that’s another story)—is here.

The Lonzos’ loyalty has real value to the Golden State—it will help California retain its labor force as baby boomers retire in greater numbers. Polls also show that the Lonzos are far more supportive of taxing themselves to support public investments than the LeBrons are.

In this context, the Lakers are sending precisely the wrong message to their fans, and to all Californians. So cheer for our superstar import if you’d like. But don’t forget that our future depends on Lonzo.

The post LeBron, Take Your Ball and Go Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The time: December 5, 1982. The place: Los Angeles. The storied Showtime-era, Lakers, coming off an eight-game win streak, were facing the Philadelphia 76ers for the first time since defeating them four games to two in the previous season’s championship series. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar opened up scoring with a signature sky-hook before Dyan Cannon had even reached her seat. It might have been a normal Sunday evening at the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood. But it wasn’t.

Moments after the first-half buzzer had sounded and Magic Johnson & Co. had disappeared into the locker room, the Laker Girls, led by a 19-year-old Paula Abdul, took the floor clad in headbands, tube socks, gym shorts, and T-shirts. Emerging onto the court after them were nine little men in gold basketball uniforms. On their backs were fractions in place of whole numbers, and on their chests in big, blue lettering were the words “HOLLYWOOD SHORTIES.”

Movies may have paid the bills, but for the Hollywood Shorties, hard work paid off on the court.

 
The Hollywood Shorties baseball and eventually basketball teams had been founded in 1949 by legendary dwarf entertainers Billy Barty (a renowned character actor) and Jerry Maren (of Lollipop Guild-Wizard of Oz fame) as a rare opportunity for little people to gather publicly. As their athletic skill increased, so did membership and their popularity. By the early 1980s, the Shorties had created a niche in entertainment akin to the Harlem Globetrotters, playing exhibitions from Gladstone High in Covina to the Fabulous Forum with their signature blend of comedy and basketball prowess.

The Shorties’ baseball team preceded their basketball stardom.

 
On December 5, 1982, the Shorties’ lineup included rebound king Mike “Pebbles” Gilden, fireplug Kevin “Animal” Thompson, and Adonis-like Chris “Bam-Bam” Romano, who would go on to become the reigning powerlifting champion in the Dwarf Athletic Association of America. But the main attraction was Tony Cox, known simply as “T.C.” At 3’6” his arms barely encompassed the basketball, yet he could hit long-distance three pointers with astounding accuracy.

The Lakers would lose 114-104, but ask anybody who was there and they likely won’t remember that. What the crowd would remember is that at halftime a basketball team of dwarves ran circles around the Laker girls in the wackiest basketball game they had ever seen. But even more than that, those who had the great good fortune to bear witness to that game would remember the shot.

This was not a playoff game. Technically speaking, this was not even an NBA game. This was a five-minute spectacle, an exhibition basketball game between quasi-recognizable dwarf actors and the Laker Girls. This was halftime entertainment of the most frivolous variety, perhaps better suited for a vaudeville stage than a professional basketball arena. But when Tony Cox’s underhanded three-pointer swished through the hoop, none of that mattered.

“Did you see that?!” “How did he do that?!” “Was that underhand?!?!” Laker fans were stunned and thrilled, and let out a roar so loud the Lakers themselves heard it in the locker room. “Who in the world are these guys?”

Who in the world were the Hollywood Shorties? A fair question. The fact that they had been making the scene throughout the Southland for over 30 years at that point had failed to make a strong impression on the general public. Their most widely publicized events had been charity matches versus the moms of Galaxie Little League, or the leaders of the Azusa Chamber of Commerce, or the inmates of the California Rehabilitation Center in Corona, or the student-faculty all stars of Lawndale High—none of which had made them household names.

Charity matches against the moms of Galaxie Little League and Azusa Chamber of Commerce didn’t quite make the Shorties a household name.

 
For anyone, a moment such as the Shorties experienced would be wonderfully exciting. But for a group of little entertainers, who had suffered all the indignities and more of Tinseltown, and when they did book a show were forever hidden behind another monster mask, or elf mask, or leprechaun mask—for these men, the chance to show their natural talent in such a dramatic and public way amounted to nothing less than a mountaintop experience.

More than three decades later, the Hollywood Shorties talk about that day as if it were yesterday. “Ohh, it was just so big,” says Joe Gieb.

A native Texan, Gieb caught the first train to clown college upon graduating high school. After traveling for several years with the circus, he landed in Los Angeles where he was immediately plugged into the dwarf community, which, for an able-bodied young man, inevitably meant the Hollywood Shorties. By 1982, Gieb had played in dozens of basketball games with the Shorties, but of only one of them does he say, “I’m still high on that one.”

A new documentary on the Hollywood Shorties details the team’s formation, fame and lasting legacy.

 
George Rossitto was involved with the Shorties from age 8, when he was brought onto the baseball team as a batboy. The son of short stature actor Angelo Rossitto (of Beyond Thunderdome, Master Blaster fame), Rossitto opted for the practicality of a career in aeronautics rather than follow in the footsteps of his father, but he never walked away from the Hollywood Shorties. And in 1976, founder Billy Barty handed over the managerial reigns for the Shorties to George, who immediately named basketball the Shorties’ primary focus.

Playing the Laker Girls was actually George’s idea. In 1982 it was still possible to call the Forum, be connected to the Director of Promotions, and with simple charm and wit land a halftime gig on the biggest stage in the NBA. As George puts it, the experience was, “A high that you couldn’t even think about.”

Today, Tony Cox is remembered more for his turn as a thief in the 2003 dark comedy Bad Santa than for the three pointer that sent the Forum into a frenzy. He shrugs off questions about working with Michael Jackson in Captain E.O., but when asked about hitting that three he can’t contain his smile: “I’ll never forget that moment—that crowd, that noise.”

While The Garbage Pail Kids Movie paid some of the Shorties scale, Under the Rainbow provided weeks of overtime, and Jedi placed Shorties (aka Ewoks) squarely in the annals of cinematic history, each of these can be easily classified under the heading “Right place, right time.” And though it paid them each just pennies, only of that halftime game at the Fabulous Forum might it rightly be said that, “Hard work always has a payday.”

The Shorties would go on to play many games against the Laker Girls throughout the 1980s. Other NBA teams would also provide them a stage, including the Los Angeles Clippers, Sacramento Kings, Golden State Warriors, and Seattle Super Sonics.

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