Commentary: Losing on purpose is unethical and corrupt
By Arthur Caplan, Lee Igel, and Dominic Sisti With one week to go in the NBA regular season, Sam Hinkie decided to step down as general manager and president of basketball operations of the Philadelphia 76ers. As Sixers fans know, Hinkie has deliberately had the team tanking for years. His departure has to do with the Sixers brass, at the behest of an aghast NBA, forcing him to share decision-making authority with newly recruited executive Bryan Colangelo.
By Arthur Caplan, Lee Igel, and Dominic Sisti
With one week to go in the NBA regular season, Sam Hinkie decided to step down as general manager and president of basketball operations of the Philadelphia 76ers. As Sixers fans know, Hinkie has deliberately had the team tanking for years. His departure has to do with the Sixers brass, at the behest of an aghast NBA, forcing him to share decision-making authority with newly recruited executive Bryan Colangelo.
But mainly Hinkie's departure has to do with a failure of "The Process." And therein lies a moral tale.
Hinkie relinquished his roles and responsibilities in a farewell letter to Sixers ownership that is festooned with references to intellectual luminaries over a rambling 13 pages. It spans references to the likes of Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, to the S&P 500 and an extinct, flightless bird once native to New Zealand. Most of it, though, provides insight into "The Process."
For the past three seasons, Hinkie has been tied to The Process. That is the title given to the approach he took to building the Sixers by losing and losing, thereby stockpiling draft picks, draft picks, and more draft picks. It contributed to the Sixers racking up 47 wins and a whole lot of losses - 195 of them, with more than 67 this season. In pursuit of the future, the franchise will own the rights to the worst three-year span of losses in NBA history.
Did The Process include the Sixers tanking on the court so that the team had a better chance of accruing higher draft picks? Was the team purposely built to stink in the short term in the interest of long-term success through the draft? That is, at least for many fans, as good an explanation as any for the team's futility on the court.
But also consider that Hinkie had a responsibility to do what is best for the franchise in accordance with the rules of the league. However, those rules do not obligate him to prioritize the short term over the long term or vice versa.
No team executive will reasonably admit to long-term tanking. Losing on purpose year after year is an unethical, corrupt practice. It rips off the fans, demoralizes young players, makes a joke of competitiveness, and puts a crummy product on display that few will patronize. At the professional level, there are no reasonable circumstances in which a strategy of long-term losing is right.
That said, the NBA draft rules should be rationalized to prevent the extreme moral hazard Hinkie so readily embraced. Teams should not be encouraged to lose. Evidence of intentional tanking, such as multiple 10-game losing streaks, should result in penalties.
The Process netted the Sixers up to four first-round picks in the draft in June. It will be up to Colangelo and company to determine whether to select players with those picks or make trade bait of them. No doubt they are already at work on what to do, especially because there are no players on the Sixers roster from the 2012-13 season and few that anyone would want on the current roster.
Sports is often said to be a way for young people to learn values. Hinkie's "Process" taught all the wrong moral lessons.
Taking the dive of the century in the hope of possible long-term return is a not a strategy - it is lazy. The Process says good things come to those who stink. It endorses an ethos of gaming the system to get ahead. It teaches professionals to be losers, damaging them irreparably both as players and as people.
"The Process" also pays zero respect to fans who must place all hope in a tomorrow that may never come. It teaches that integrity means nothing. Those who don't compete come away as the winners - hardly a message the NBA wants to be sending to the next generation.
Granted, professional basketball may not be the place you turn for moral inspiration. But when star players have more impact on kids than lots of ministers and teachers, the NBA does have a responsibility to provide professional role models - whether on the court or in the corporate office suite.
Hinkie taught that striving to be the biggest loser may be a legitimate strategy for doing well. There is little virtue in that lesson.
Arthur Caplan is the director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center and a director of NYU's Sports and Society program. arthur.caplan@nyumc.org
Lee Igel is a clinical associate professor at New York University's Tisch Institute and codirector of the Sports and Society program. lee.igel@nyu.edu
Dominic Sisti is the director of the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics in Behavioral Health and an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.