Colangelo doesn't help Sixers in game of offseason poker
In retrospect, the most revealing moment of Bryan Colangelo's brief time as the 76ers' general manager came late on the night of the NBA draft, when he did so much to present himself as the well-meaning fellow you'd want sitting next to you at the poker table.
In retrospect, the most revealing moment of Bryan Colangelo's brief time as the 76ers' general manager came late on the night of the NBA draft, when he did so much to present himself as the well-meaning fellow you'd want sitting next to you at the poker table.
After selecting Ben Simmons with the No. 1 overall pick, the Sixers had tried and tried to acquire another pick in the top 10, a transparent overture to draft a guard. They failed, in part because everyone around the league had a good idea of which players Colangelo was willing to trade, and he reminded the world of his goals again that night.
"By staying the course, we still have some things to do to this roster to make it more balanced," Colangelo said. "I've talked about roster balance being a key objective."
This was not the first time he'd spoken like this, and for an executive whose father remains one of the NBA's most powerful people and has long had a fitting nickname - "The Godfather" - Colangelo has a bewildering habit of letting people outside the Sixers' inner circle know what he's thinking. To achieve that precious roster balance, to make room for the arrivals of Simmons, Joel Embiid, and Dario Saric, Colangelo has made it clear that Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel are on the market. So now, nearly a month after the draft, it shouldn't be surprising that the Sixers' roster remains unbalanced, that neither Okafor nor Noel has gone anywhere and that Colangelo has cost himself leverage in his attempts to get maximum value in return for either player.
What he's succeeded in doing is this: He has taken a situation that was already complex, that required patience, and has made it more tenuous, more fraught with peril for the Sixers' future. If the impulse to trade either Okafor or Noel is a natural one - last season suggested that the two were incompatible when they were on the floor together - Colangelo and the Sixers still would be better served by fighting it. The argument for trading one or both of them has always been based on the notion that each one's value was at its peak and would only drop once Embiid and Saric started taking minutes from them. That notion is false.
Noel doesn't need 35 minutes a night to demonstrate that his awkward-as-an-Erector-set jump shot has improved, that he can give a defender reason to guard him 10 to 15 feet from the basket, that he can be more than an excellent weak-side shot blocker. And for all of Okafor's refined post skills, he still has to show that he's capable of growth on the court and off. He has to become a better defensive player, a better rebounder, a harder worker. And after that succession of troubling incidents last season - the fight in Boston, the 108-mph dash across the Ben Franklin Bridge, a confrontation at an Old City nightclub in which someone drew a gun on him - he has to prove, to the Sixers and the rest of the league, that he can keep his nose clean.
Time is the best and most effective answer to these questions, the best way for Colangelo and the Sixers to learn what they really have in Okafor, Noel, Simmons, Embiid, the entire team. But by making his intentions so obvious, Colangelo has undermined himself. Okafor and Noel now know that the Sixers are shopping them, and that's a problem, because even though it makes sense for the Sixers to keep both players into the regular season, Colangelo has created conditions for a disgruntled locker room the longer that Okafor and Noel stay.
For all the criticism (justifiable and not) that Colangelo's predecessor, Sam Hinkie, took for treating every player like a commodity, like a possible trade piece, there was at least one upshot to Hinkie's approach: Every player was on equal footing, in that none of them had much of an idea what Hinkie was up to. He made no guarantees, offered no assurances. But Colangelo was supposed to be the anti-Hinkie, the relationship-builder, and instead he's established a dangerous hierarchy on the roster. There are promising young players who know they won't be traded - Simmons and Embiid are the primary examples - and promising young players who know that Colangelo, despite whatever he has told them, has tried to trade them. That dynamic promises to cultivate resentment and jealousy among teammates and handicap Colangelo even further, should Okafor and Noel decide that they don't want to play for an organization that doesn't really want them.
Yes, this is a delicate situation for the Sixers, and Bryan Colangelo has to find his way out of it, and no smart general manager around the NBA will be in a rush to help him. He's already told the world what he wants to do, what hand he's holding, and he has no choice now but to wait for the next card to come and hope there's an easier mark across from him.
@MikeSielski