Listen, I understand, they’re awful. At the same time, it’s the Super Bowl halftime show. Do you really give a shit?

Ha, okay. Thanks. And to dtmad66, too. I’m not from the US, so the extent of my knowledge on that story was that he’s a football player whose name I’m pretty sure I’ve heard because he did something bad - I never would’ve put it together. Thanks!

I still don’t. :(

THEY’RE STILL REAL TO ME, DAMMIT.

So your criticism isn’t that the plan sucks but that Hinkie sucks at executing it? That may be true - hard to tell at this stage given the uncertainty you point out at the top of the draft - I’m not sure how you believe so strongly in that and are so ready to conclude that his failures are incompetence rather than bad…

Wow, you’ve figured out that Shaq, LeBron and Duncan have been to a few finals. Crack reporting.

Sure, but the Celtics started from a position of multiple big name players that they could use to fleece Billy King. Hinkie started with Holiday, Turner, Hawes, T Young, N Young - the last 4 of whom are almost valueless, in that you could get a guy like that in free agency any time you like - and turned them into…

Okay, let’s agree to disagree on his value to that team.

If you don’t think Bogut made a major contribution to last year’s Warriors then you weren’t watching. But sure, his finals was hindered by injuries, so lets give you the Warriors. So that’s one team in 15 years, and they’re a team who were just about the most inept in basketball until a transcendent player fell into…

The talent gap is not marginal. Look again at the lists you posted. Look again at that 538 chart. You have to go back 15 years to find a finals team that didn’t get a major contribution from a top 5 pick. Top 5 picks made up 11 of last year’s 15 all-NBA guys. 8, 10, 9, 10 the years before that. This isn’t a…

If you don’t think there’s a better chance of a top player at the top of the draft than elsewhere then I don’t know what to tell you. Just look at the lists of guys you posted in your first post. Just look at the expected wins produced at each draft position: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-m…

The Warriors absolutely brazenly and openly tanked in order to keep the pick that got them Harrison Barnes. They were literally the biggest recent example of open tanking until the Sixers came along. Remember the fans booing the owner? They were perhaps the most miserable franchise in the league - they’d made the…

Ha! I’m not from Philadelphia - I’ve never even been there - so I don’t pronounce things the way you think I do.

I don’t know what would happen - I’m not making the argument myself, I’m explaining the most coherent view on Hinkie’s argument, and I have no way of knowing how he will react to stuff that hasn’t happened yet. I suspect that intellectually he’d like to just keep rolling the dice, and that it would be ownership that…

What you’re talking about - the uncertainty and variance inherent in the lottery and scouting and drafting and developing process - is part of the Sixers’ argument for what they’re doing. Read the early interviews from Sam Hinkie when he got the job - thinking about and trying to understanding uncertainty is like his…

The latter is here:

you’re daaaamn right.

And you know that I know, and should thus be able to figure out that my question had some purpose other than genuinely trying to find out. Who’s being obtuse?

So you read it as “Tejada had one runs batted in”?

You’d have to be seriously fucking radical to live in a huge, global city and say “my favourite place here is an imax” and still have ‘cool’ be the first place someone goes when describing you.