I respect him for speaking out at this point. The Sixers are one of the purer forms of trainwreck.
This...this is ‘the process’. They’ve destroyed Noel and Okafor’s careers because they were hell bent on being as bad as possible.
They got extremely lucky with Embiid and Simmons plus Simmons was after the Hinkie era where he had some type of mentors.
Nonsense. Noel and Okafor had plenty of opportunity to develop with Embiid missing 2.5 seasons. The Sixers have two undrafted players, McConnell and Covington, who have taken advantage of the opportunities that "the process" provided them.
Noel had a chance to sign a 70M deal with Dallas but his ego made him really stupid. Now he's not getting much playing time with Dallas. Where's the outrage with Carlisle not playing Noel?
Okafor was happy when he was getting his minutes on a lousy, losing team while being one of the worst defensive players in the league. Now he complains when they are winning because he can't beat out Amir and Holmes for playing time. He did have two opportunities to play when Embiid sat out this season. He put up hollow numbers in a blowout loss to the Raptors and had a terribly bad 3 minutes against the Jazz.
I'll cosign this.
Why weren't Covington and Mcconell ruined by the process? Why isn't Noel excelling in Dallas now that he's free of the tyranny of Philadelphia? Why is Philly "lucky" they got Embiid and Simmons but any other team that drafts a star player isn't (Boston, excluded, since they drafted their young stars with someone else's pick)?
Philly is lucky in that the draft always requires some luck, but less so than most other teams because they engineered better odds for themselves than those others teams. They gave themselves room to whif on Okafor and Noel (and possibly Fultz) and wound up with two guy who might be foundational stars for the next 15 years.
Noel absolutely has no cause for complaint. Okafor, less so. He was the third center drafted in three years. His rookie year, he had to play nearly half his minutes with Noel, which was obviously going to be a terrible fit. He wasn’t spectacular his rookie year, but neither did he look like a bust.
Then he got hurt. Supposedly it was a minor knee injury, with a short recovery time (6 weeks) after surgery. Since it happened in March, that ended his season. And then it turned into a much longer injury. Now maybe it was always a bigger deal than the Sixers said it was, maybe Okafor’s rehab went poorly, or maybe the surgery messed up. There’s no was to know,!especially with the Sixers, although based on how they handled several other injuries under Colangelo (Simmons and Embiid last year, arguably Fultz this year), my guess is that the Sixers lied about the severity. So during his second season he played hurt because the Sixers wanted to trade him, before getting surgery to correct the same knee issue shortly after the trade deadline passed.
And then there’s how the Sixers have handled trading him. Recall last year before the All-Star break when they didn’t play him, and even sent him home to go pack, because a trade was imminent. Of course, that never happened. Okafor certainly was embarrassed (who wouldn’t be), but said nothing publicly. They gave his agent permission to go seek out trade destinations — his agent did, but Colangelo decided the offers brought back to him weren’t good enough. If you value the guy that’s one thing, but instead they declined his option and are refusing to play him.
Okafor is going to be a free agent this year and probably hasn’t been healthy on a basketball court for 22 momths, and the Sixers, for reasons that no one can understand, are refusing to let him play after refusing every trade offer received. He should absolutely be upset.