By Lewis Gould
Pablo Torre has an exquisitely written, well-reported tome in the March 2, 2015, issue of ESPN the Magazine on the Sixers, and even got their Howard Hughes-like recluse of a general manager, Sam Hinkie, to sit for interviews!
But buried in the article is this sugar plum about good old Andrew Bynum, whom the Sixers acquired in 2012:
Months earlier, in the 2012 playoffs, the Sixers had won their only series since 2003, edging a hapless Bulls squad that had lost Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah to injuries in Games 1 and 3, respectively. In August, still high off its own fumes, Philly went all-in with a sequence of roster moves. Most radical of all: a four-way trade centered on Magic center Dwight Howard and Lakers center Andrew Bynum. The latter, who had just a year left on his contract, became a Sixer for an extraordinarily high cost: Philly’s best player, Andre Iguodala; the No. 15 pick from June, Moe Harkless; a gifted young center, Nik Vucevic; and a 2017 first-rounder. Harris and Blitzer believed they were clearing the decks for a top-10, 96th-percentile-type player. But Hinkie, surveying payroll, delicately submitted that not only had they overvalued Bynum, but their 35-31 team might actually have been made worse.
… the Sixers finished 34-48 that 2012-13 season, tying for last in the division. Worst of all, Bynum wound up recording more bowling-related season-ending arthroscopic knee surgeries (one) than games played in a 76ers jersey.
Their would-be star was a hazardous fit — sometimes even literally. One day, memorably, the rehabbing big man parked next to Aaron Barzilai, DiLeo’s newly hired director of basketball analytics, in the parking lot of the team facility at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. As Bynum shuffled inside, Barzilai noticed something on their would-be star’s custom black Ferrari and called after him. Bynum, it turned out, had driven away from a gas station without removing the pump’s nozzle and eight- foot rubber hose, which he’d dragged, python-like, through the street.
