Pretty simple. Sixers broke the cardinal rule. “Do not talk about Fight Club.”

They started 0-17 and 0-18 in consecutive seasons.

The issue was they were blatantly doing it and not hiding it.

There’s a number of 🏀 fans especially on Reddit that have the mentality that every single team that doesn’t have a winning record are tanking.

Also if you aren’t in the conference finals you should tank because you’re wasting your time.

Just because a team isn’t good it doesn’t mean they’re tanking.

If the league didn’t step in we’d have 15 centers.

The jazz should get Bryan Colangelo installed as a new GM.

It’s only fair

Tanking is a completely valid way to rebuild and should not even be looked down upon. I’d much rather commit to a full blown tear down until I find a star player rather than being stuck doing whatever the hell the bulls and kings have been for over a decade.

If you tank competently you’ll have a somewhat competitive team within 5 years. Beats making desperate moves and being a first round exit at best. Not every team gets gifted a franchise player every free years, so tanking is the best way to be competitive 

Because they were fielding a local gym team. Because they were branding it and bragging about it. There needs to be a word stronger than blatant to describe it.

These were normal sized league actions. Find a new slant.

There’s a difference between a team that is trying to lose games and an organization that is not trying to field a competitive team. The latter is how the Spurs looked to me when they were tanking. They traded away players who didn’t fit the timeline, and avoided drafting players that would make them better quickly but not be Victor-level superstars (like passing on drafting Sengun). So the teams were bad. But every game it seemed like Pop was legitimately trying to get the most out of an (intentionally) bad group. He still cared about developing players, playing the right way, and trying to win games. The team just wasn’t good enough to actually do it, by design.

Can Adam Silver now step in for forever 7-10th seed teams to start the process?

Hinkie bought into his Illuminati shit too deeply, he tried revealing his magic in order to assert absolute control over the victims. The league didn’t want the curse to be explained, they prefer to sprinkle hints of tanking, like the Simpsons drop hints about upcoming events.

The comparison to what the Lakers did is off-base (as is a lot of this).

The worst three years of the Lakers had them put up: 26, 17, and 21 wins The worst three years of the Sixers had them put up: 19, 18, and 10

Averaging 21 wins a season is very very bad, no doubt about it. Averaging 16 wins a season is so much worse, because not only was there a ten win season in there, but their highest win total in those three seasons was barely above the worst year of the Lakers. Poorly built teams win 20-25 games all the time; essentially no one is winning 10-15 games unless they’re making no effort to compete all season whatsoever.

If the Sixers won 20 a year, it doesn’t become the issue that it did. They’d still be at the bottom of the league or very close to it. But barely finishing in double digits one year, intentionally playing guys who weren’t NBA caliber players constantly, and openly bragging about what they were doing as if they were smarter than everyone else is what did them in.

You can be bad. The league accepts that even if they don’t like it. You can’t beat your chest about how intentionally bad you are and how much smarter you are than every other org for doing the easiest thing in sports: losing.

You Hinkie followers are and have always been fools that refuse to admit you were wrong. It was cult-like how irrational the arguments were and alarming that so many aren’t willing to let it go years later.

Especially when so many teams that were doing it the “wrong” way, according to you, have become champions.

Any time the league smells a tank going on, go ahead and take away their pick. The bullshit has got to stop

The worst was when they punched the Bulls for resting Robin Lopez, like a single MF was going to see that “star”. Then when Carter, Jr. was drafted the refs called fouls every time Carter was on the GD floor. The league is biased, crooked and now must force betting on the masses, too.

Hot take - let’s go with a system where it’s something like the bottom 5 teams PLUS the 2 play in losers each have a 10% chance and then the ones in the middle 5%

Flatten it out but also incentive fighting for the shot at the playoffs a bit

This plus modify draft pick trade restrictions to be like 2-3 standard versions (e.g. un protected, Top 15) would eliminate 80% of the current fuckery

it’s been 25 years since the sixers made it past the second round

They got punished because it worked. Simple as that. Now every team does it and you can’t punish everyone.

Those Sixers teams were disgustingly bad, and shit had to change.

They gave it a fucking name and flaunted it for all to see.

I don’t really think anyone else had been doing it so blatantly. The process effectively started the term tanking and that notion.

I’m shocked Jerry Colangelo isn’t in the Epstein files.

The league did not force the Sixers to fire Hinkie and hire Colangelo. Sixers ownership made that decision.

Yeah yeah sure give your tanking a name, flaunt it all over the league call everyone dumb and trade every single asset you have and then the league won’t intervene

The league was 100% right too do so and a team losing on purpose giving it a name, trading every single asset they have with zero care should be punished, there’s tanking and then there’s what the Sixers did

Look at this dumb logic

The Lakers averaged just 5 more wins per year and were top 3 in the draft lottery each season of the process.

Yeah? Did the Lakers trade their ROTY winners and every single young player they have? The Lakers were just ass, they weren’t trading everyone to blatantly tank