SAM HINKIE
Title: President of basketball operations, general manager, Philadelphia 76ers
Career path: Consultant with Bain & Co.; hired by the Houston Rockets in 2005, led the charge in deploying analytics to evaluate players; hired by the Philadelphia 76ers in 2013
As a former business consultant with Bain & Co., Philadelphia 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie knows the importance of forecasting market trends ahead of others.
It’s that business acumen that led Hinkie, 36, out of the private business world and into the NBA after he saw how the teams were moving to a more data-driven process in building team rosters while navigating the increasing challenges of salary cap management.
After earning his MBA at Stanford, Hinkie left Palo Alto for the Houston Rockets in 2005 to become assistant to
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Hinkie speaks to former player Bo Outlaw during a summer league game last year at the Amway Center.
Photo by: NBAE / Getty Images |
then-general manager Carroll Dawson. Hinkie was promoted in 2007 to vice president and worked side by side with new Rockets general manager Daryl Morey (who also had worked for Bain). Together they were at the vanguard of a new style of player evaluation where analytics and economic modeling guided player decisions.
After Hinkie was named the Rockets’ executive vice president in 2010, he began to gain notice around the league as a whiz-kid general manager in the making. In 2013, Sixers owner Josh Harris, himself a data-driven equity fund owner, was drawn to Hinkie’s reputation as a numbers-crunching executive and hired Hinkie as president of basketball operations and general manager.
Hinkie last year immediately began to overhaul the Sixers roster with a number of trades while shedding burdensome player contracts to free up cap space for future moves. It was an ugly process, with the Sixers last year posting a 19-63 record while enduring a 26-game losing streak and accusations of tanking. Just how Hinkie uses the stockpiled draft picks and
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financial flexibility remains to be seen.
While Hinkie knows it’s his job to sometimes talk to the media regarding the state of his team, he avoids the spotlight and declined to comment for this story. Others, however, have put great stock in Hinkie’s plans.
“He is one of the smartest guys in the business,” said Sixers CEO Scott O’Neil, who runs the team’s business operations and leaves all basketball decisions to Hinkie. “Everyone has their own ideas, but Sam sees things differently than others, particularly in a business that has operated the same for a long time. He is redefining the position and what the GM job looks like.”
