Sam Hinkie's process continues despite a quiet draft night

THREE HOURS and 20-plus minutes felt like an eternity. That's the amount of time that had lapsed between the Sixers' draft selections at No. 3 and 35 overall at Thursday night's draft.

Where had Sam Hinkie gone? The 76ers general manager is usually very active on draft night.

The Sixers were rumored multiple times to be trying to get back into the first round, perhaps to finally draft a point guard - whether it was Notre Dame's Jerian Grant or even Duke's Tyus Jones.

But it was mere silence as the first round progressed and turned into the second round. It's not as if the Sixers didn't have trade chips. They owned five second-round picks and have plenty of future first-round picks to trade away in order to acquire assets to aid in the rebuilding process.

The only transaction that was completed came after the Sixers drafted Guillermo Hernangomez, a 6-11 center from Spain. He was dealt to the Knicks, reportedly, for two future second-round picks. The stockpile of assets in Hinkie's arsenal gained more picks and not players.

"We always try to put ourselves in a position to have a lot of options to look at," Hinkie said. "That includes deals, deals on draft night. And so there's often lots of work that goes into that and lots of conversations with lots of other teams. Sometimes there's a flurry of activity, really the last 2 years we've had a flurry of activity where we've come out with several trades and we've come out with sometimes several picks in the lottery.

"[Thursday] night, we sort of just did one trade, in some sense, which maybe is a bit unusual. But you don't want to sort of be making moves to make moves. You want to be making things that you think will really moves things forward and that will really add talent to the pipeline in a way that makes sense. And if not, you want to do other things."

Out of the other four picks the Sixers had in the second round, two will join the list of Sixers players being stashed overseas (center Arturas Gudaitis and power forward Luka Mitrovic) and two will have a chance to make the team's roster over the summer (power forward Richaun Holmes and guard J.P Tokoto).

Hinkie indicated it was never really a plan to use those five second-round picks to add more players to the team's current roster.

"We wouldn't have gone into the draft in that way to say, 'Let's bring six rookies to this team, five of which would be outside the Top 30 available in their college class.' That's not the way we would have approached it."

"Three is good, two we could handle, four we could handle, but bringing five or six I wasn't super excited about. We can count the players on our own roster, and if you thought we were going to roster five or six of those guys, then that means we'd have to make moves with some other guys that we like on our team."

When the Sixers didn't fill their need at guard with the third overall pick, and didn't take one at all until the 58th overall pick in the draft, questions arose as to how the void would be filled.

Free agency begins on Wednesday, and the Sixers will be looking for perimeter players, Hinkie indicated. There will be a wide range of players available, but whether or not the Sixers are in the market for a star like Chicago's Jimmy Butler or looking for a more affordable plug-and-play option remains to be seen.

"One of the things we'll look for, like many teams in the league, we'll look for shooting," Hinkie said. "But we've got to make sure that those prospects are the ones who will get better, and get better here."

"We have some capability internally, too. I don't want to minimize that. We'll have Tony Wroten returning from injury, we have Isaiah Canaan under contract as well. We have some within our team already that we still think have potential."