The Colangelos, and perhaps the NBA, failed the Sixers

As the Philadelphia 76ers rake up the fall-out from the Colangelo family Twitter scandal, one can’t help but think back to the process that put the family in charge of the team in the first place.

The Sixers must now find a new leader for their front office after Bryan Colangelo resigned due to unsavory, trust-destroying tweets sent by his wife. This must happen as the Sixers approach their most important offseason in memory, with a huge opportunity to turn a rising 52-win club into a legitimate championship contender.

Philadelphia could very well come out of all of this just fine: the team is incredibly promising, and would-be candidates will put more stock in a future with Ben Simmons, Joel Embiid, and cap space than the ousters of Sam Hinkie and Colangelo. There will be no enduring stain on the Sixers, because frankly there is never an enduring stain on any NBA franchise. Success washes it all away.

But it’s going to hard for Philadelphia to forgive what the Colangelos and the NBA have wrought, especially if actual basketball decisions made during the Colangelos’ tenure age poorly. There’s one in particular that stands out as a potential future threat to Pennsylvanian sanity: Markelle Fultz for Jayson Tatum and the Kings’ 2019 first-round pick, protected only at No. 1.

If the Sixers never win a championship with this core, Tatum continues to look much better than Fultz, and the Celtics get a blue-chipper out of that Kings pick, the Colangelo Twitter saga will live forever in infamy.

How involved the NBA, and more specifically commissioner Adam Silver, were in attaching family patriarch Jerry Colangelo to the Sixers remains a mystery. At a minimum, Silver made an introduction between Sixers’ majority partner Josh Harris and the elder Colangelo in late 2015 as the franchise tripped through a particularly rough season and sought help. Colangelo had owned the Phoenix Suns for a highly successful 17 years, and beyond that had run the Suns as a general manager for decades. More recently, he was at the helm of USA Basketball amid its return to elite form. He was the ultimate NBA insider.

At a minimum, then, Silver tapped a domino that ended up getting Colangelo hired as a special adviser to Harris, just as Hinkie’s tenure seemed most in danger. The complication was that Colangelo’s son Bryan, himself a longtime NBA front office guru, was looking for a new job. We know how this played out: the Sixers hired the younger Colangelo into a position of ultimate power within the front office, and Hinkie left shortly thereafter.

At a maximum, Silver didn’t just introduce Harris to Colangelo, he told the Sixers that the Hinkie era needed to end. This seems unlikely to have happened, as Silver does not have a reputation as a meddler, unlike perhaps his predecessor David Stern.

In fact, most reporting from late 2015 and early 2016 indicates that general league-wide sentiment turning against the Sixers likely influenced Harris to consider other paths forward. Lots of people in the league were mad at Philadelphia and Hinkie. That got to Harris, and he eventually hired Colangelo for the sweetest gig imaginable: the septuagenarian could advise Sixers ownership on the future of the team from his home in Phoenix.

That advisorship quickly turned into Colangelo landing his son the top job in the Sixers’ front office. Funny how that worked out.

If Silver only made an introduction, he is without culpability and should live without guilt for the eventual mess that this all became. But if he did more — if he suggested to Harris that adding a more experienced basketball mind like, say, Jerry Colangelo, would be good for the team given the sentiment against Hinkie — then Silver should feel some level of responsibility about what’s happened here. Say what you will, but Hinkie never embarrassed the franchise or alienated key players like this.

But really, the lion’s share of blame belongs at the feet of Jerry and Bryan Colangelo. What the elder Colangelo, the NBA insider of all NBA insiders, did to place his son in power and undermine Hinkie is the definition of selfishness. Contemporary reporting indicated that Colangelo was the No. 1 suspect in the leaking of Hinkie’s simultaneously glorious and inglorious 13-page resignation letter. This was adding insult to injury.

(I am personally convinced Hinkie absolutely wanted that letter to make it into public view, even if he was mortified that it happened before he could alert his staff he was resigning. You don’t write 7,000 florid, reference-heavy words just for the benefit of bosses you’re leaving.)

When Jerry Colangelo arranged for his son to take over the Sixers, he took on responsibility for his son’s actions. Likewise, when Bryan Colangelo shared inside information about the Sixers with his wife, he took responsibility for her actions with that information, including secret taunting of players on social media.

In what has happened, in the way the Colangelos have made their bed, their tenure with the Sixers will be lamented. If the Sixers do win a title with Embiid and Simmons, it will be because of Hinkie’s planning and in spite of the Colangelos’ two years of oversight. If the Sixers fall short, the Fultz-Tatum trade and any failure to capitalize on 2018 free agency will fall at the Colangelos’ feet.

Perhaps that isn’t fair, but neither was the Colangelos’ grasp of power in Philadelphia in the first place. What goes around comes around.