Sixers Front Office Drama... I Really Don't Care
Sixers Front Office Drama... I Really Don't Care
“It doesn’t matter what Alex Rucker is doing!” - The Rock, probably
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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God bless the local media folks who had to scramble all last week to have strong opinions about the likes of Peter Dinwiddie, Prosper Karangwa, Sergi Oliva and Phil Jabour. Yes, the Sixers front office is a-shufflin', with titles changing hands like UNO cards and folks climbing up and sliding down the org chart like a game of Chutes and Ladders. Maybe in some quarters this could qualify as palace intrigue, except it's near-impossible to craft a coherent narrative about what's going on, let alone one that actually has any kind of real spice to it.
I gotta say, this is all really boring. I mean, it's news, and it's explicitly Sixers-related -- that's gonna be in preciously short supply in the months to come, especially now that we don't even have Jimmy Butler hanging 35-point triple-doubles in the finals to publicly flay our front office and ourselves over -- so I guess we gotta make the most of it. But the minutiae of the Sixers' mediocre cabal of front office pencil-pushers and handshake-greasers is just not doing it for me right now. I'd rather just throw my full emotional energy behind mentally willing the Braves to complete their collapse from up 3-1 in the NLCS.
I apologize that this makes me a bad team player here. Obviously, the official stance of the Rights to Ricky Sanchez is that #EverbodyGottaGo, with Spike prepping KRS-One-level slam poetry about Alex Rucker, Mike compiling dossiers on the Sixers' entire culinary staff and MOC, Zo and SixersAdam staking out potential Scott O'Neill pickup games in case they can somehow school him into retirement. I support my RTRS brethren in their noble efforts as always, and in theory I guess I agree with their general thesis here.
But I also don't really care. Does the Sixers' brain trust largely deserve to lose their jobs after the tailspin of last season and the larger-picture squandering of so much of the team's upside? Probably. Will I personally be outraged if we do a full sweep of the Wells Fargo Center in two months and it turns out that Ned Cohen is still hanging out in a supply closet somewhere? Not really. Does it matter to me if Elton Brand is now officially the team president, the EVP, the general manager, the global ambassador or the vice president of insight and foresight? Hell, make him all of 'em. One Collaboration GM is as good as another.
I’d likely be more invested if I thought that real change was possible here, or that the folks we'd be bringing in would be guaranteed to be less problematic than the folks we'd be giving the boot. With our ownership, I'm extremely skeptical. We had our chance with an actual difference-making GM, shit got a little too real, and now aggressive competence and professionalism will be the top priority forever. Some of these guys are better than others, I'm sure, but fuck if most of us will ever be able to clearly tell who's who there, and I certainly don't have the energy to try to fake it at the moment.
Daryl Morey? I never really believed it was a possibility. Sixers fans got themselves so hyped so fast on the possibility of bringing in Morey -- understandably so -- that nobody seemed to really bother answering the question of why either side would actually agree to the partnership. Sixers ownership patience with Hinkie and The Process grew so thin that they broke the sound barrier running in the other direction once he'd been rid of -- so now they're going to bring in his mentor? Morey just got out of a situation beset with cap difficulties, mercurial and/or enigmatic stars, and meddlesome ownership with sketchy business and political connections -- so now he wants to jump right back into another? It didn't really make sense in 2018, and I think it makes even less sense now.
And that's basically where we are at the moment. The trajectory-altering execs are either off the market or uninterested. We can rotate B- and C-level guys in and out of the front office all offseason but to me it's the much-less-fun equivalent of moving through a bunch of low-level prospects on ten-day contracts. (Talking myself into Alex Poythress or Jarvis Varnado is one thing, deep-diving on Peter Dinwiddie's or Prosper Karangwa's star potential feels a little less romantic.) The true purge isn't coming anytime soon, and as long as our ownership is in place, I'm not sure how much good it would end up doing anyway. In the meantime, we'll just have to hope that mere competence and professionalism will somehow be good enough to get our misshapen, overpriced and insufficient roster where it needs to be.
This isn't me doing the Jimmy thing again, where I actively beg folks to stop talking about the executive turnover. If you care enough to break out the magnifying glass and decoder ring and try to piece together what all these new entrances and departures could mean, go nuts. If you're still angry enough about those retained in the Sixers brain trust to keep calling for further blood on Twitter, by all means, keep howling at the moon. Hell, I envy you still having the passion to try. For me, all I can really muster at this point about anything to do with the front office is a shrug. Grainy Footage workout season can't get here fast enough.