1. SAM HINKIE
On Philadelphia 76ers president (read: GM) Sam Hinkie’s watch, the team has lost 28 straight games if you combine the end of the 2014-15 season and the beginning of the 2015-16 season, lost 26 straight games during the 2013-14 season (tying an in-season NBA record for futility), lost the first 17 games of the 2014-15 season and lost the first 18 games of the 2015-16 season (tying an NBA record). Worse, the losses haven’t produced a single number one pick and one of Hinkie’s picks – 2014 first round selection Joel Embiid – appears to be the Cameroonian version of Greg Oden.
Now, two-and-a-half-seasons into a multi-year tankathon, 76ers ownership has decided to hire former Phoenix Suns and current USA Basketball guru Jerry Colangelo as the “chairman of basketball operations” to help make Hinkie’s rebuilding process “go faster.” What this might really mean is making Hinkie’s exit from Philly go faster.
2. BLAKE GRIFFIN
Whenever you get ferociously dunked on by a 39 year old you belong on the Stiff List. Even if that 39 year old is future Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett.
3. THE PHILADELPHIA 76ERS
While I hate to kick an entire team while they’re down, but when you lose by 51 points … at home … to a team missing three of its eight key players (even if that team are the venerable San Antonio Spurs) … you belong on the Stiff List. The 76ers are so bad that they even gave up a second half lead to our Denver Nuggets on Saturday in what I would call a “bizarro Nuggets game” (i.e. it’s usually the Nuggets who blow a second half lead, not the other way around).
Simply put, the 76ers are an embarrassment to professional basketball, nearly on par with the Washington Generals, and Colangelo is going to soon find that cleaning up Hinkie’s mess in Philadelphia will be much more challenging than cleaning up Stu Jackson’s mess with USA Basketball.
4. THE LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS
In what might be the least surprising story of the 2015-16 NBA season thus far, Yahoo! Sports’s Marc Spears is reporting that the Clippers “gauged trade interest” for both Lance Stephenson and Josh Smith last month. Without making a single phone call to a legitimate source I could have told you that the Clippers were shopping the cancerous Stephenson and the equally cancerous Smith around, proving once again that Clippers’s head coach and president Doc Rivers has no business wearing the “president” hat alongside the head coach hat.
5. TYREKE EVANS AND ERIC GORDON
Coming off a thrilling overtime win against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Friday night, the New Orleans Pelicans starting back court of Tyreke Evans and Eric Gordon decided to impersonate Vincent Yarbrough and Junior Harrington by combining for zero points on 0-7 … at home … against the Boston Celtics on Monday night. And Evans threw in five turnovers in just 17 minutes of playing time just to make sure he had a well-rounded outing.
