Hayes: Colangelo taking 'organic' approach to grow Sixers

BRYAN COLANGELO is 51 but he has the physique of a 21-year-old. He wears the sort of slim-cut suits favored by British movie stars. He looks like a Paleo man who considers "gluten" a dirty word.

Not surprisingly, Colangelo uses the word "organic" as a catchword, much the way Sam Hinkie used "assets" and "process."

So, with his fixation on natural agriculture, Colangelo must be a careful eater, right?

"Not really," he said with a laugh. "Maybe the occasional organic egg, here or there."

His diet will change, he said. The Sixers' cafeteria in their new training complex will feature organic offerings for the team Colangelo rebuilt in the wake of the Hinkie era.

The Sixers' front office will refine the team's roster in similar fashion.

"We're going to let some of this play out," Colangelo said last week. "We want some of this to happen organically."

Colangelo was trying to calm some of the anxiety surrounding the Sixers' glut of young centers and the potential roadblock at power forward. His points were simple.

First, on-court play would determine a merit-based pecking order for centers Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel, the latter of whom repeatedly expressed his displeasure over the logjam and said that one of them should already have been traded. Second, as the season progressed, other teams' interest in the centers would change due to the players' performance and the other teams' needs. Finally, injury would spur attrition.

And so it has begun.

Embiid was scheduled to be limited to 12 minutes against the Celtics on Tuesday. Okafor, coming off minor knee surgery in March, was not allowed to play at all.

Rookie forward Ben Simmons broke the fifth metatarsal in his right foot Friday. He underwent surgery Tuesday and will miss a significant portion of the season. His absence cast a pall over the exhibition opener Tuesday night.

It was an unfortunate development, if not unforeseeable.

Players now enter the NBA draft bigger and younger and, generally, in better condition than ever, with more demands on their time and with a more sophisticated understanding on marketing themselves.

The stresses of those circumstances make them ever more vulnerable to injury: over-training and over-playing in their teen years; diets that are high in sugars and fats and lower in beneficial nutrients; boutique training regimens that invite overuse injuries; addictions to electronic devices that can lead to poor sleep habits; and, of course, the general immaturity typical of rich young men.

To be clear, it is possible that none of these issues influenced Simmons' injury. That, for this discussion, is irrelevant.

What is relevant is that Simmons' absence creates room in the frontcourt for Dario Saric, the Croatian Sensation. It also might help Jerami Grant, a phenomenal athlete who, after two seasons of playing a version of power forward, the Sixers slotted as a small forward.

At this moment the Sixers, still reeling after three seasons of prescribed losing, cannot offer a definite plan for players like Noel, Okafor and Grant, whose development was stunted. They cannot project defined roles for Saric and Embiid, who have never played.

The Process - a legitimate one, this time - will involve further and fluid evaluation of Noel and Okafor. It will hinge on initial evaluations of Embiid, who missed his first two seasons with a broken foot, and the complex, enticing talents of Saric.

Desperate to correct the errors of Hinkie's innovative and flawed tenure as general manager, the team in December hired Bryan Colangelo's father, Jerry, to oversee Hinkie. With Bryan Colangelo's hiring imminent and a demotion on the horizon, Hinkie quit in April.

Bryan has been cleaning up and reorganizing ever since. Hinkie left him Noel, Okafor, Embiid and Richaun Holmes, four centers who belong in the league; a lottery pick that became Simmons and Saric, rookie forwards with intriguing, indefinite abilities; and, of course, no viable point guard.

So, which big man plays when, and how much?

Who cares?

Noel, in his fourth season, frets that he won't see credible playing time and won't be able to showcase himself for contract purposes with Embiid joining the group, but if Embiid plays even 20 minutes per game in 50 games, that will be an unqualified success for the franchise, as long as he does no further damage to his apparently fragile body; remember, a stress fracture in his back shortened Embiid's only college season, too.

Other questions remain, but their answers are unknowable.

Who's the point guard? Nobody, again, probably.

Newcomer Jerryd Bayless, for the moment; but then, Bayless has never averaged more than 3.8 assists in any of his eight NBA seasons, in which he has started just 81 games, often as the shooting guard. Perhaps Bayless will turn into a latter-day Ron Harper and finish his career as a lesser light among big stars. Sergio Rodriguez returned from Spain after a 6-year NBA absence, but he's as much an enigma as any rookie. T.J. McConnell, an undrafted scrapper who filled the point-guard vacuum that Hinkie created last season, says he's quicker and fitter.

Any of them could emerge as the top dog; it probably won't matter which. Besides, Saric will occasionally be running the offense, anyway. Let it develop. If the players learn fast enough, wins will come.

Hinkie's teams never won 20 games. Last season the Sixers won just 10. How many wins will it take to qualify this season as successful?

As many as a team focused on development can muster.

Still, Colanego said, "I certainly would hope to think we would win more than 10."

That was a shot at the previous regime, and it was warranted, considering Hinkie left Colangelo a "culture of losing," as Colangelo put it.

To be fair, Colangelo often credits some facets of Hinkie's plan. He appreciates the flexibility, talent and draft picks Hinkie's machinations produced. Still, Colangelo is reluctant to revisit 2014-16.

"We're looking forward, not back," Colangelo said. "It's not dissimilar to a construction site on a skyscraper or a real estate project."

Yes, it is dissimilar.

Skyscraper construction requires definite plans that must be carried out in a specific chronological order with severe time constraints. Skyscrapers do not arise "organically."

But it is the only way to build a basketball team.

And, of course, it is the best way to farm an egg.

@inkstainedretch Blog: ph.ly/DNL