Philadelphia ruled out Joel Embiid for the season with a knee injury on Wednesday, and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much. The Sixers are 22-38, 6½ games out of the last playoff spot and just traded away a key rotation player. Embiid’s surgically repaired foot is fine, and Philly will benefit more from adding lottery ping-pong balls than a few extra wins.

Embiid will be back, a true franchise player joining a likely franchise player (Ben Simmons) and the now probable Rookie of the Year, Dario Saric, in an absurdly talented young frontcourt. The 76ers will have a high lottery pick in a point guard-rich draft, two if the ping-pong balls bounce the Lakers out of the top three.

The future is bright. And do you know whom Philadelphia can thank? Sam Hinkie.

That’s right. Hinkie. The maligned overlord of one of the most criticized roster deconstructions in NBA history. The man who dumped established talents for first-round picks and less established ones for second-rounders. The man who shrugged at Embiid’s pre-draft foot injury and coolly swapped the rights to Elfrid Payton for Saric despite Saric’s preference to stay overseas for two years after being drafted.

The 76ers took their fair share of criticism during the Sam Hinkie era. (AP) More

That Hinkie. I’ve done a 180-degree turn on Hinkie. For years I joined the chorus hammering the former general manager and president of basketball operations of the 76ers for showing no interest in winning. I traveled to Philadelphia and sat through midseason games where at times the media came laughably close to outnumbering the fans in the building. I watched Hinkie roll out rosters headlined by Hollis Thompson, Jerami Grant and Tony Wroten, and wondered how the NBA could let Hinkie get away with it. Then after seeing teams attempt to revamp the lottery system and the league nudge Jerry Colangelo toward Philadelphia, you realize that it tried to stop him.

Nearly four years after Hinkie was hired and you wonder: Does anyone in Philadelphia regret the era? Three straight sub-20 win seasons were painful, and watching Hinkie trade away established talent (Evan Turner, Michael Carter-Williams, etc.) for draft picks was worse. But here are the Sixers, exactly where Hinkie hoped they would be, loaded with elite young talent and primed to be the heir to a post-LeBron James conference throne.

Hinkie didn’t want to be Sacramento, a nipping-at-the-fringes playoff contender with no discernable plan to significantly improve. In fact, Hinkie took advantage of the Kings’ desperation to be decent by absorbing a couple of salaries in exchange for a first-round pick. That pick — likely unprotected in 2019 — could be in the high lottery because Sacramento is in the fledgling stages of a rebuild of its own.

Hinkie didn’t want to be Atlanta, a solid playoff contender with little hope of being much more. The Hawks made the decision to hold on to Paul Millsap before the trade deadline and pledged to pay him the market rate to keep him around. But building around a pair of 30-something bigs (Millsap and Dwight Howard) is a short-term solution, and unless the Hawks can lure Paul George or Russell Westbrook to Atlanta in the coming years, they will be sitting on a pair of depreciating assets in a conference ripe with rising young teams.

Despite another big injury, Joel Embiid appears to be a franchise player. (AP) More

No, Hinkie wanted to be … this. He wanted a roster loaded with 20-something stars and the cap space to add veterans to improve it. Philadelphia isn’t a free-agent destination — yet. But players know what Embiid is and understand what Simmons and Saric could be. If the Sixers make the jump to a mid-30-win team next season — and .500 and a push for a playoff spot isn’t out of the question — established veterans with options will start giving Philadelphia a look.

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