Post-Draft Podcast: Sixers Take Jahlil Okafor, Hinkie Hath Forsakens Us and Feelings

Apologies this wasn't posted earlier. After Spike and I recorded an Emergency Ricky right after the Sixers selected [INSERT DRAFT AND STASH BIG MAN, DON'T FORGET TO GO BACK AND INCLUDE HIS REAL NAME], I went home, ate a bowl of soup, and went to bed. Then I woke up with a tremendous migraine, powered through it to catch up on Twitter, and vomited my face off. #ThanksHinkie #ThanksObama

But before my body turned into a gelatinous mass of canned minestrone, I picked up the ol' microphone and recorded a podcast with Howard Eskin's traitor son. It is filled with feelings and confusion and a little bit of hope. Listen to it here, or in the player below.

Keep in mind that this is, quite literally, seconds after the draft ended. We'll have more considered opinions on our next podcast sometime soon. My disappointment can be summed up nicely in this Grantland article from Process Truster Danny Chau. I probably went overboard with the thread of other GMs freezing Hinkie out, but ultimately it boiled down to a lackluster, by-the-numbers draft. No creativity, none of the light-on-his-feet spark we associated the past two drafts with, nothing. Maybe losing out on D'Angelo Russell affected him more than he let on in today's press conference, but it felt to me like there were plenty of opportunities to move up and around and all over, and Sam didn't pull the trigger.

The process isn't a failure or dead or anything like that. This, to me, was a misstep, and while I'm excited at the prospect of watching Jahlil Okafor dominate the post in Philadelphia, I'm not nearly as locked and loaded for the next decade of the Sixers core as I had been hoping.

Meanwhile, this...

2016 being the last year before rookie scale goes up gives me more confidence that's the target year for Hinkie and his 4 firsts + Saric.

— Michael Levin (@Michael_Levin) June 26, 2015

...will hopefully be a thing. Hold your breath for a year and we'll be there.

Thanks again for keeping it here for the NBA Draft. Liberty Ballers absolutely crushed our previous record for site traffic, which was held by the 2015 Trade Deadline at a respectable 81.2 thousand sessions. Last night, we hit 255.8 thousand, tripling that, and leading the entire SB Nation NBA network by a very sizable margin. Nearly 450K pageviews in one day. I remember very clearly -- as I'm sure Tanner and Derek do -- days when we'd struggle to hit a thousand. What this site's grown into is a testament to everybody involved, and you guys reading and commenting and sharing, and I'm so goddamn proud of everything I could die.

Anyway, listen to the podcast. Jahlil Okafor's gonna be really good. They'll figure the rest out. I love you people so much. I'm gonna go try not to throw up.