By most any measure, Philadelphia 76ers have had a tough season. The silver lining is that it was, to some degree, by design. Playing the long game in acquiring assets and building a top-heavy roster necessitates some losing, a tradeoff that General Manager Sam Hinkie & Co. are obviously happy to make.

The narrative on the surface has been that the Sixers are just their biding time; piling up losses and waiting for franchise-saving talent to arrive. Underneath the surface, however, there is a lot more work being done. It’s hard to see through the mountain of losses and no-name players, but the Sixers are (really, truly!) working on transforming themselves even as they wait for their roster to coalesce.

At first glance, the Sixers offense looks like a raging dumpster fire. Basketball-Reference has them scoring an average of 95.5 points per 100 possessions — dead last in the league, a full 10 points below the league average, and nearly five points beneath the second-worst offense of the New York Knicks. That ineptitude is only emphasized if you put it in a historical context. Looking at Philadelphia’s offensive efficiency as a percentage of the league average rates them as the third-worst offense of the three-point era.

Data from Basketball-Reference.com

ORtg+, developed by Andrew Lynch, is exactly what I described above — the team’s offensive efficiency as a percentage of the league average from that season. It’s a useful adjustment for comparing team performance from different eras when standard offensive and defensive levels of performance were dramatically different. The way to read it is that, this season, the Sixers’ offensive efficiency was just over 90 percent of the league average.

However, historically bad results don’t necessarily imply bad processes. While the Sixers offense has been absurdly inept, it’s not because they haven’t decided on a generally effective approach and worked hard to implement it. To separate what Philadelphia is trying to do from what they’re actually accomplishing, we really need to look at four stylistic traits.