National Basketball Association

Bryan Colangelo is Proving That the Tank is Over

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

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The Philadelphia 76ers president and general manager said the team wouldn’t tank this year, and he’s backing that statement up.

It’s been clear over the past few seasons that the Philadelphia 76ers were pretty good at losing. Much of that was by design.

Over the last three full seasons, the Sixers won less than 50 cumulative games, and escaped tying the league’s all-time worst record ever by just a single game last season. Things couldn’t get much worse if the team tried, and according to Bryan Colangelo, the team won’t be trying to lose this time around.

Leading at the beginning of each of the last three years in the president’s seat was Sam Hinkie. Although Hinkie never came out and expressed that it as a goal of the team to lose games, it was evident based on the rosters that were put on the floor that the team wasn’t trying to win games. The result was several top-tier draft picks, something the Sixers used to their advantage in getting many pieces at starting a solid roster.

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Now, with their 2016 top overall pick Ben Simmons out with injury for the first several months, it would make sense that perhaps the team would just call it a year and adopt a tanking policy in order to get another great draft pick with a huge draft class coming up this season.

Bryan Colangelo said no.

When Tom Moore asked him whether or not the team would be tanking, Bryan said, “not a chance.”

This isn’t much of a surprise. If you asked Hinkie straight up over the last three seasons if the Sixers were tanking, he certainly wouldn’t have explicitly said yes. That looks bad. He would have found a way to dance around the question.

That’s what some thought maybe Colangelo was doing here. It just made sense that if the team was missing a huge part of its roster, hey, why not lose some games to better position themselves for the future?

On Tuesday, however, Colangelo made it clear that that is not a part of the plan. Colangelo drew up a deal with the Oklahoma City Thunder that sent Jerami Grant to OKC in return for Ersan Ilyasova, a stretch four forward. The deal completed and Ilyasova played on Wednesday night.

Ilyasova is a player who has just one year left on his contract, a stop-gap player that will help the Sixers win games this season. Unless he wows the Sixers and really gels with key pieces of their future, there’s little chance the Sixers bring him back next season.

Win now, that’s the goal that’s being put forth explicitly by Colangelo. They want to be as good as they possibly can be. They want to see improvement on the court, and they don’t want to just take away games that “feel like wins” like the first game of the season against the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The front office wants to see the numbers build up in the “W” column this season. This may dictate how the team runs things moving forward, especially with head coach Brett Brown. Patience will almost always be a factor with the Sixers, but without a doubt there is going to be times where the team does things that will be in the scope of this season rather than seasons far out.

Eventually, that had to happen. If the team kept looking towards the future, success in the present would never come. Whether or not fans feel this time is right to consider the present a “must-win” situation, it may streamline the process and get things done much quicker.

Win now, win later, it seems like fans have been tricked into believing only one of those things can exist. If the Sixers can come up with deals that get both things done, they should be all for it.

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