Okafor the Sixers' third big man taken in 3 years

THREE STRAIGHT Sam Hinkie drafts have produced three straight similar results. Three big men.

However, the similarities don't start and end with the position. Nerlens Noel, Joel Embiid and now Jahlil Okafor are all centers. All three were arguably the best player available on the board when the Sixers picked. But that's not all. All three, at one point, were consensus No. 1 overall picks during their time in college or before.

Noel ended up dropping to New Orleans at No. 6 in the 2013 draft before quickly being traded to the Sixers. Embiid was once regarded as the most prized prospect in the 2014 draft before questions about his foot injury popped up - questions that still have no answer - and he slipped to No. 3.

And Okafor, the mammoth 6-11, 270-pound center from Duke, was the top player in his high school recruiting class and widely regarded all year as the No. 1 overall pick in Thursday's draft before the meteoric rise of Kentucky's Karl-Anthony Towns and Ohio State's D'Angelo Russell, the guard many thought the Sixers coveted most.

But another draft resulted in another talented big man and a log-jam in the post. Hinkie, who's entering his third year as the team's general manager and president of basketball operations, said that the Sixers were still in the stage where adding the best player available to the "pipeline of talent" trumped a positional need. The best lead guard available after the Lakers selected Russell with the No. 2 pick was Emmanuel Mudiay, who went seventh to Denver.

Does Hinkie not value the point-guard position?

"I do think it's important," Hinkie said yesterday during a day-after-draft press conference at PCOM, the team's practice facility. "I think point guards are an important part to any NBA team, they're an important part to winning. I think bigs are an important part to winning as well. I think what's been clear over time, not just in today's NBA, but, really over history, is having the best players. Having the best players wherever you can find them, whether that's at the shooting guard, whether that's at the center, whether that's at the point guard, having the best players is what's the most critical thing.

"I think we've acknowledged we need players at every position. The situation where we find ourselves, we say, 'We need to add the highest level talent we can and we need to add someone that can really move us forward and someone that can really be an enormous piece for us.' We were very clear going into the draft, and honestly very clear for the last few years going into the draft, that we take the best available player, whoever that was."

So the Sixers got the best player they could get in the draft position they were in, seemingly for the third straight year.

Okafor, who Hinkie said would play in both Summer League sessions - in Utah and Las Vegas - is a polished offensive talent who averaged 17.3 points and 8.5 rebounds per game for a national championship-winning college team, all while shooting a staunch 66.4 percent from the floor. His list of NBA comparisons include Tim Duncan.

"We feel incredibly fortunate, incredibly fortunate to be able to have Jahlil and to be able to add him to our team," Hinkie said. "I spent so much time in Durham, North Carolina, this year. If you would have told me, part way through, that we would get him, we would have slept a lot more. We would have slept a lot more in the interim along the way. For him to be there and for us to have the chance to draft someone like that . . . we just feel incredibly fortunate."

Prior to the draft, news of Embiid's recovery from a foot injury revealed the 7-footer had not been healing properly. Hinkie said yesterday that Embiid likely would not play in the Summer League and it's unknown yet what his availability will be once the season gets underway.

Perhaps Embiid's status made picking Okafor more necessary.

"You try to take it all in," Hinkie said. "I'd like to think we would have had the courage to do it anyway. I really do. It's kind of hard to know because I knew, and it's hard to unknow, where things stood with Joel."

But if Embiid and the Sixers are to get good news in the coming weeks, the Sixers will have three prominent options at the 4 and 5 positions, with three guys who need to be on the court.

"We'll purposely experiment, purposely try it a different way and see if our expectations were wrong," Hinkie said. "We'll do a lot of that. We've done a lot of that even this year. We did a lot of that with Nerlens."

The common perception among NBA watchers is that guards win games. For the time being, the Sixers are built from the post, out. It's unconventional in today's NBA, but Okafor's game isn't typical of today's NBA center.

"You don't see players like Jah in today's era, not very often," Hinkie said. "You don't see them. They don't come along in a way where you're looking to feed them over and over and over, where they've been commanding double-teams since they were 12 or 13 years old and been learning to deal with those. That's a style that was once common and is now less common.

"And now the question is: If someone comes back and enters our league, that does that again, what happens?"

We'll all soon find out.