I Feel Like I’m Taking Crazy Pills
by Boobie
The Friday and Saturday news dump windows have long since come and gone, and Bryan Colangelo remains president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. I can’t believe I’m typing this. I’m sort of typing it to work through my feelings, because my feelings are that either I’m going insane or that I’m living in a variation of the Truman Show where everything in my life is real except that when I go online my Twitter and sports website feeds are replaced with a universe where Colangelo still has a job in Philadelphia. I would wave this possibility off if it didn’t seem more plausible than the idea that that’s actually the fact of what’s happening.
What could possibly be the rationale behind keeping him around during the time when a new GM should be getting acquainted with the team, scouting prospects, contacting other teams about possible trades, and doing the illegal tampering that everyone ignores because it’s under the radar (unless you’re Magic Johnson) and a league-wide practice? To me,there are only a couple scenarios that would make any sense.
The first is that the Sixers, worried about the PR of throwing their guy under the bus before all the evidence is in, are allowing him a grace period lasting the amount of time of a cursory investigation into the situation. In a league where the most successful franchises have very little front office turnover, I can see how they would think that trust and diligence would reflect better than immediately turning around and kicking him out of the building. The issue with that is that the damage is already done, PR-wise. The entire league believes that at least Colangelo’s wife, if not more members of his family, were responsible for the accounts, most seem to be skeptical of the idea that he had no idea who was running them and that someone must be out to get him, and that the information and message tweeted from them were at least partially reflective of Colangelo’s own point of view. What’s the best-case scenario? That the 5% chance that neither he nor his family had nothing to do with them turns out to be the truth, the team is still a laughingstock due to the pall of the whole story, and the team gets to continue being run by Colangelo? That’s a pretty bleak best-case.
The other reason I can think of that the team might not want to fire him (or “allow him to resign”) ASAP is that he and his father, Jerry Colangelo, the known desiccated corpse surviving on the blood of virgins and occasional Frankenstein’s monster-style electrical therapy, are blackmailing the team. It’s well known that the NBA put the Sixers in touch with the elder Colangelo in 2015 following a couple embarrassing but not egregious public incidents regarding then-rookie center Jahlil Okafor. Colangelo’s reputation around the league was sterling — he put together the Suns team that went to the 1994 NBA Finals behind Charles Barkely and Dan Majerle and was USA basketball chairman from 2009–2016 — and the league and the team thought his relationships could make up for the perceived coldness and quietness of Sam Hinkie’s regime. Of course, towards the end of the 2015–16 season, Hinkie resigned, and within a day, Jerry’s son Bryan had taken over his job, to the fury of the Sixers faithful.
Sixers fans believe that Jerry Colangelo’s addition to the front office was not a gentle recommendation but rather an order from commissioner Adam Silver, and, despite the team’s claim to have interviewed dozens and dozens of candidates to replace Hinkie, fans also believe that they spoke to precisely one: the son of the man forced onto the team by the league to avoid embarrassment. If both of these beliefs turn out to be true, it could be a black eye not only for the league, which would have not only meddled in team affairs but would have in fact put the wheels for this entire disgraceful saga in motion, but also for ownership, who would be perceived not only as kowtowing to the NBA to the detriment of the team but to utterly failing to do their due-diligence in replacing the locally-beloved Hinkie in favor of pure nepotism (the younger Colangelo was struggling to find a job at the time, having failed to even secure the job as GM of the Brooklyn Nets, starless and owing their first round draft picks to the Celtics for several more years at the time).
Would that information coming out be more harmful to the team than continuing to employ Bryan Colangelo, though? I guess if the due diligence wasn’t there when they hired someone as insecure as he is, they feel like it had better be there when they fire him, which I understand on an intellectual level but doesn’t make the wait any more frustrating.
The fact of the matter is that Bryan Colangelo, whether it’s his fault or not, can no longer perform the job of president of basketball operations effectively. How could any free agent trust him while believing that he or his wife tweeted undisclosed information about Okafor failing a physical? Or when the Joel Embiid, the team’s main draw, has shown zero public fair in him? How could any team negotiate a fair trade with him while believing that he or his wife tweeted out details of what would become the Markelle Fultz trade? Why would any agent allow their client to work out for him after he or wife cast all the blame for Fultz’s shooting woes on Fultz, or blamed Embiid for the injury that ended his season in 2016–17, or blamed Nerlens Noel for the meager return the Sixers managed to get for him at that season’s trade deadline?
The best analogy I’ve come up with for this situation is, to be sure, an over-dramatic one: imagine an Olympic sprinter who gets in an easily avoidable car accident while his wife is driving. The sprinter’s legs are both broken just a month before he’e supposed to compete for the gold medal. Despite the fact that the accident isn’t his fault, he’s not going to run in those Olympics, because his wife’s mistake damaged him in a way that wouldn’t allow him to compete. That’s why Bryan Colangelo cannot remain GM of the Sixers: due to a mistake made by someone other than him, he’s unable to do what’s expected of him. He wasn’t even a gold medal sprinter to begin with, so this level of deference is insane. Delaying the inevitable while the team’s top free agent target makes jokes at his expense doesn’t help the team in any way.
Of course, if that Truman Show thing I mentioned at the top is actually happening and Bryan Colangelo has been long since relieved of his duties, I hope everyone watching me write this blog in between fits of tearing out my hair and yelling at the nearest wall enjoyed the show. That would at least be one positive outcome of this whole thing.
