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Jake Fischer Trusts ‘The Process’
L OCA L
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
PHILADELPHIA 76ERS
center Joel Embiid scored 30
points in a first-round playoff
victory over the Washington
Wizards on May 23. To 76ers
fans, it was an auspicious
beginning to the team’s quest
for an NBA championship,
which would be the franchise’s
first since the 1982-’83 season.

Having entered this year’s
playoffs as the No. 1 seed in the
Eastern Conference, hopes are,
understandably, quite high.

To Jake Fischer, the perfor-
mance by Embiid and the rest
of his teammates is the culmi-
nation of much more than one
season of high-level basket-
ball. The author of the new
book “Built to Lose: How the
NBA’s Tanking Era Changed
the League Forever” sees the
first-game victory as another
chapter in a story that begins
years ago, one that he’s been
itching to tell.

Fischer, 27, lives in Brooklyn,
where he writes about the
NBA for Bleacher Report.

Previously, Fischer worked
for Sports Illustrated, and his
writing has appeared in GQ,
The Washington Post and
SLAM Magazine, among other
publications. Much like the story of
Embiid and the 76ers, Fischer’s
story doesn’t start with wild
successes. Unlike the team’s
7-foot-3 center from Cameroon,
his begins at Cherry Hill East
High School.

Fischer was “somewhat of an
OK basketball player” in high
school, by his lights, competing
in regional Maccabi Games
and in the local JCC league,
too. When it became apparent
that he probably wouldn’t be
taking his talents to the colle-
giate level, Fischer decided
to devote more of his time to
working on communications
for his USY region, Hagesher
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM (now called Mizrach). He also
decided that he would pursue
a career that was slightly easier
to break into than professional
basketball: writing.

He got his start writing for
Eastside, the school newspaper.

After he graduated in 2012,
heading off to Northeastern
University, Fischer landed
an internship at SLAM, the
legendary basketball publication
that he’d dreamed of working
for one day. Through his school’s
co-op program, he was also able
to cover high school basketball
for The Boston Globe.

In between those gigs,
Fischer started to write a little
bit for Liberty Ballers, a local
76ers blog. That was 2013, which
happened to be the year that the
team hired a Houston Rockets
executive named Sam Hinkie to
be the general manager.

That’s where Fischer’s story
and that of his book begin to
converge. Hinkie deployed an aggres-
sive tanking strategy, losing as
many games as possible over
multiple seasons in order to
acquire a slew of high draft
picks. Players of value were
quickly flipped for future
draft picks; the team became
a repository for every other
team’s second-rounders. To
many observers, and some in
the league office, “The Process,”
as it came to be known, flew in
the face of competition.

To Fischer and others, The
Process was a chance to give
the team the best possible shot
at winning an NBA champi-
onship: drafting an elite player
with a high draft pick. One of
those elite players, drafted by
Hinkie, was Embiid.

For years, Fischer observed
from afar as Hinkie’s strategy
seemed to have massive ramifi-
cations for the rest of the
league. Since he was fired in the
spring of 2016, Fischer sensed,
Hinkie’s team-building philos-
ophy was increasingly seen as
more than the fringe views of
Jake Fischer
Courtesy of Jake Fischer
Courtesy of Triumph Books
a short-lived front office execu-
tive. Maybe, rather than being
foolhardy or anti-competitive,
there was something visionary
in what he’d tried to do.

In 2019, Fischer’s time at Sports
Illustrated came to an unfortu-
nate end after Authentic Brands
Group, a brand management
company, bought the magazine
and laid off 40 employees. The
year before, Fischer had started
to put together some notes for a
book about The Process and the
league-wide reactions to it, and
he decided to take the oppor-
tunity to press forward with
the project.

Over the next few years,
Fischer interviewed more than
300 agents, players, coaches
and front office executives for
“Built to Lose,” which he wrote
covering the period of Hinkie’s
2013-’16 tenure. The book
retells old, forgotten stories and
brings to light new elements of
what Fischer argues is a forma-
tive era of contemporary NBA
team-building. With the onset of the
pandemic, Fischer was able
to lock himself in his room
and write until he couldn’t
anymore. He feels lucky to
have had something to keep
himself busy during those
early days of lockdown.

Now that “Built to Lose,”
published by Triumph Books,
is out, Fischer believes the story
he’s told makes it clear that
there’s no better alternative for
small market NBA teams than
Sam Hinkie’s tear-it-down
team-building method. Thus
far, the reception has been
positive. “I definitely was confident
that people would like it,”
Fischer said, “But now that the
work is out there and people
are enjoying it, it’s definitely
really rewarding.” l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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JEWISH EXPONENT
MAY 27, 2021
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