[Source](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1xrknxoCxJnvdbqvFv3c4F?si=KXUcNIO0Tdms3QKiyoq8rw&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A6rZnRL3IFXCu5ps0KJ9VF2&t=3877)
>With OKC doing this year-after-year in a small market that’s not supposed to be paying into the revenue sharing system, the league has pretty much turned a blind eye.
>What the Thunder did with Al Horford and with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is far more egregious and far more “tanky” than anything Sam Hinkie’s 76ers ever did.
>They didn’t openly sit healthy players or turn a little ankle sprain into a season-ending malady.
42 comments
[X] to doubt.
Thanks for your opinion Fischer
I mean, I disagree completely. There is more talent on some of these Thunder teams that were trotted out than some of those 76ers rosters
“Year after year” so two years?
Was Shai not injured? You can’t make this claim unless you’re accusing OKC of lying about Shai’s injuries.
And regarding Horford, non tanking teams sit vets who are waiting to be traded pretty often. It’s kind of happening with Jae Crowder right now and the Suns obviously aren’t tanking.
The Sixers purposely didn’t stock their tank teams with any actual talent. Just look at the guys who started games lol:
https://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/PHI/2015.html
>doing this year-after-year
“Year after year” is certainly one way to describe two years.
shai’s injuries have largely been legit, he sat Canadian team stuff last summer because of the plantar fasciitis he sat out with, is presti making the Canadian team tank as well?
Jake Fischer just unloading every thought he’s ever had today, huh?
That’s cause the Thunder *have* actual talent on the roster, but Hinkie purposely went out of the way to sign and play the worst guys possible so even if he was playing his best guys, they were still awful.
Shai sitting last year (2022) was 100% a tanking move.
Him sitting in 2021 was legit planar fasciitis that also kept him out of playing for team Canada. After Shai was out, it didn’t make sense for Al Horford to keep playing. Similar to what Houston did with John Wall the entirety of last year. It doesn’t make sense to put mileage on aging players when they have an opportunity to go elsewhere and make an impact.
They just drafted players that missed whole seasons instead (Noel, Embiid, Simmons)
Strong disagree. Simply by virtue of having those guys on the roster and playing at all, the Thunder put out an infinitely better product then the process 6ers did.
Inflammatory comment that holds little to no basis in facts and is designed to anger readers for attention
Yep he’s an NBA journalist alright
Pretty wild that in 2022 people are still pretending Hinkie got railroaded.
Hinkie would have traded away Shai by now
Jake Fischer’s takes are just like his sources. Baseless, worthless, and incorrect.
Yahoo Sports Moment.
I never understood how we got away with the Horford thing. But Shai has had genuine injuries the past two years
180 million dollar contract, it’s not like playing for OKC kept him from getting paid. The best chance SGA has to win a title is either a contender getting really aggressive around the deadline and bankrupting their future for a pretty good player like him, or OKC’s hoard of picks turning into two guys who are better than he is. Asking out is just gonna end with him on the Knicks or some other hopeless team.
SHAI HAD A PLANTAR INJURY THAT KEPT HIM OUT OF THE OLYMPICS QUALIFIERS WITH CANADA. Unless Presti has something incriminating on Justin Trudeau, Shai is not the thunders’ problem!
The Thunder were in a Game 7 in the playoffs barely over two calendar years ago. The embellishment about the duration of the Thunder’s rebuild is bullshit.
SGA has had legitimate injuries in each of the past two seasons. And it’s entirely reasonable not to play an aging vet like Horford on a rebuilding team with no playoff aspirations.
Also: the Thunder have had the fourth best lottery odds each of the past couple seasons. Why are they being singled out for tanking when they aren’t even bad enough to fully optimize the situation?
Lol is this a joke ? They CHOSE to draft guys who were injured, drafted 3 straight centers in the lottery, wasted a full seaosn playing 2 of them, started a season with 0 point guards on the roster only to end up trading for Ish Smith to give him 25% usage. Traded the reigning rookie of the year (which was a GREAT decision).
OKC has only tanked for 2 years, they never even had the worst record in the NBA in those 2 years, I don’t know why everyone is so obssessed with them, I wish my team did that 10 years ago
If a 20 win team is what ‘egregious tanking’ looks like after odds-flattening then it is clear that the changes were a complete success.
Its insane that people cant see these as different situations
Reminder:
Jake Fischer is the guy that made up the fake news about OKC offering SGA and 6 for Cade.
He’s a certified Thunder hater and proven liar.
One of the worst people in media.
There’s nothing wrong with tanking
He’s moaning because he got burned by the Thunder when he thought he had a scoop in the bag
We purposely built a dogshit roster, but our guys never tried to lose once the games were being played. All tanking was done strategically at the front office level and not at the coach/player level. We did the best we could with what we had. We just intentionally didn’t have much.
We’ll always be the main example because we were probably the first really blatant multi-year tanking, but this also gave guys like Jerami Grant, RoCo, TJ McConnell, etc a chance to develop into the players they are today. Without the process, there’s a good chance none of these guys ever stick in the league.
Eh I’d say the rockets and John wall agreeing to do nothing is worse
Hinkie just stockpiled assets while putting a ridiculously young team on the court that played hard every game. This was Hinkies attempt to get the Sixers out of a decade long purgatory of mediocrity.
Players like Robert Covington, TJ McConnell, and Jerami Grant were able to make themselves a career out of their playing time on the Sixers.
This is also just me defending the Sixers as I’m also in the camp that nothing the Thunder has done is wrong.
The goal is to win championships and every team deserves the right to have their own strategy in achieving that goal.
Not true at all. Not even remotely close to true. 76ers had the most pathetic tank job in the history of basketball and still can’t get to the ecf
The funniest thing to me is according to NBA fans, their team never tanks. “We didn’t tank, we just had bad players!” “We didn’t tank, we were just being overly conscious of the players health!” etc
News flash – y’all are tanking. Just because 99% of the league isn’t as dumb as the Process 76ers were about communicating it doesn’t make it not tanking lol
OKC has been tanking (and at times egregiously really), the Rockets have for a couple years, my Spurs will be for a few years or so, it’s just an ugly, necessary part of the league. Just don’t act like that’s not what your team is doing lol
What is this “year after year” nonsense. They’ve been tanking for 2 years. They were literally in a game 7 of a playoff series 2 years ago
Jake Fisher’s reporting is the real tank job here.
Reminder that OKC was in a 7-game playoff series 2 years ago.
First of all, the Thunder had been at least 8 games over .500 for 11 consecutive seasons the year that Horford sat (and made the playoffs 10/11 of those seasons). No way the league is going to oust a GM that has given his team that much of a competitive advantage.
Secondly, year 1 of the tank ended in 2021 and it’s currently 2022. This just hasn’t been going on long enough to punish it.
Third, the Thunder are 648-546 under Presti (54% winning), while the 76ers were 47-246 under Hinkie (19% winning). Presti has proven he can build a winner, while Hinkie only proved he could build a team that would garner top draft picks.
Last, the league changed the rules to diminish the incentive to tank by flattening the lottery odds, so there is less reason now for competitive teams to be frustrated about tankers. For example, the Kings weren’t good last season but also didn’t tank and due to the flattened odds they jumped teams that leaned more heavily into the tank like Portland and Detroit. Now teams have less reason to complain “why do the rules punish us for trying to win,” so there’s less of a political crisis for the league to react to.
This all may seem unfair to Hinkie because ultimately he got punished for a good idea that has turned into a normal strategy, but ultimately the league’s priority is to protect the best interest of 30 owners and hundreds of millions of fans, not one GM.
Long story short, pioneers perish while settlers prosper. Tale as old as time and not something to get worked up about.
Over the three worst years of Philly’s tank, they had a .191 win percentage.
OKC could go **WINLESS,** 0-82 this year and still have a better winning percentage over the past 3 years than Philly did over those three seasons.
And the year before and after those three years, Philly was still well below .500. They completely sucked for 5 years.
Unless we haven’t even seen the worst of OKC’s tanking yet, it’s hard for me to say OKC’s tank job is on par with Philly’s.
This guy still upset OKC didn’t look to trade SGA like he claimed they wanted to? Clown
We have never been the worst team in the league while we were tanking, that would be Houston, that people curiously don’t talk about in the same way.
People just see the assets Presti has accrued and are apparently mad he also wants to double dip with our own draft pick, when in reality our team is just young as shit because we’ve drafted a bunch of players. Older players don’t want to stick around to develop people who will take their jobs from them, so we don’t keep them around to take away minutes.
Holy crap the way yall talk about this stuff would think they been tanking for 20 szn and also didn’t horford choose to sit out on his own
Also thunder made playoffs in 2020 76ers tanked from the time they trade jrue till like 2016-2018 range
I don’t follow that.
They were trying to move Horford as he wasn’t in the long-term plans.
They sat him to prevent him from getting injury (respectful to the player) during a rebuild year that he didn’t really want to be apart of.
They let him play to start to see how the team was doing, and when it was clear they sucked, they let him sit.
Shai was injured.
Maybe people here haven’t had plantar fasciatis before, but it takes months to recover sometimes without steroids, and the NBA doesn’t allow players to use steroids (which is fucking stupid in a case where a doctor normally would prescribe them).
As for the ankle injury… what is the point of rushing an All-Star calibre player back from an ankle injury for a losing season?
Hell… this was every season for Kyrie in Cleveland before LeBron arrived.
It’s a common move.
Basketball Illuminati, Basketball Illuminati, Basketball Illuminati, say it three times keep your third eye open