Bryan Colangelo doesn’t take unemployment well.
Money is not the issue. It was how to spend his time; channel his drive; feel like he was connected to an industry that raised him.
In the three years between being pushed out as president and general manager with the Toronto Raptors in 2013 and being hired as general manager in Philadelphia, one of the NBA’s ultimate insiders was an outsider for the first time.
The Raptors were five years out of the playoffs. His star had fallen. The phone didn’t ring. It was weird.
"Your life has a different cadence all of a sudden," Colangelo told me over a coffee once while he was between franchises. "In the NBA, everything is consistent and timed out, year after year. You have training camp, pre-season, regular season, All-Star Weekend, various league meetings throughout the year … it’s a constant cycle. You peel out a day or two where you have an opportunity to take a breath, but that’s what I was doing for 20 years."
Without it? His son Mattia was starring at Upper Canada College, and Colangelo never missed a game. "You get up, you take the kids to school, you have a coffee, you read everything about the business, you make the calls you want to make," he said. "Three times a week, you run out of the house to go work out. I’ve had lunch with my wife occasionally … but when there’s a game in the afternoon, you tend to build a day around that."
There won’t be any games for a while. Not NBA games at least. And lunch with the missus could be awkward for a good while, too.
In a move that seemed inevitable from the moment a May 29th report in The Ringer went public tying Colangelo or someone in his inner circle – his wife, Barbara Bottini, it turns out – to a collection of anonymous Twitter accounts, Colanglelo resigned as general manager Thursday morning.
"Our investigation revealed substantial evidence that Mr. Colangelo was the source of sensitive, non-public, club-related information contained in certain posts to the Twitter accounts," the law firm who did the investigation on behalf of the 76ers wrote in a release that supported what the Internet had already discerned: it was Bottini who opened the accounts and did the tweeting.
They couldn’t prove what Colangelo claimed – that he knew nothing about their existence – in part because Bottini had hindered the investigation by doing a data wipe of her phone. But the investigation still held him responsible.
"We believe that Mr. Colangelo was careless and in some instances reckless in failing to properly safeguard sensitive, non-public, club-related information in communications with individuals outside the 76ers organization."
The accounts generally seemed to exist in order to defend her husband’s record leading the 76ers and the Raptors; doing that in part by criticizing former 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie and current Raptors president Masai Ujiri. They also criticized current Sixers players – in particular franchise cornerstone Joel Embiid — and most damagingly made public or alluded to privately held team medical information.
The investigation included two separate five-hour interviews with Colangelo and Bottini; husband and wife starring in a Law and Order episode, NBA style.
The official language was that the 52-year-old NBA lifer resigned, but anyone who knows him would understand that the likelihood of him leaving voluntarily was about as unlikely as the thought a Twitter scandal would bring down one of the NBA’s first families would have seemed a week ago.
He went down fighting. No surprise there either. The privileged son of NBA legend Jerry Colangelo, Bryan was known for his willingness to scrap. His signature move, a college teammate told me once, was to remove his pinky ring when things started to get heated.
One of the reasons so many people were quick to believe Colangelo was in some way involved was because of that prickliness, the tendency to take what he felt was unwarranted criticism to heart. This doesn’t make him unique in his job, but the degree to which he could be set off by media reports was a bit of an inside joke around the Raptors when he worked there.
You could see the edge even in his sharply worded press release where Colangelo disputed the law firm’s assertion that he’d been careless and reckless.
"At no point did I ever purposefully or directly share any sensitive, non-public, club-related information with her," he said.
And he didn’t exactly take the doting, protective husband road when making clear he was not the Tweeter of his own demise, either.
"Her actions were a seriously misguided effort to publicly defend and support me, and while I recognize how inappropriate these actions were, she acted independently and without my knowledge or consent … While this was obviously a mistake, we are a family and we will work through this together."
It was not his fault, was his argument.
Maybe. But as a wise man who has worked with Colangelo said – "you live with his paranoia, you catch it."
Colangelo is back to being a stay-at-home dad again, but the kids are off at school – Mattia plays for the University of Chicago (that some of the ‘burner’ accounts followed the Division III school’s unremarkable basketball program was one of the clues that led many to believe it was someone close to Colangelo) and daughter Sophia is heading to Villanova in the fall. Lunches with Barbara might be on hold for the time being.
What’s next?
That’s the tragedy in this story. A former NBA executive texted me one question: "Does Bryan ever work in the NBA again?"
Talking to friends and colleagues, the tone was like someone had died. In this case it could very well be a career.
It’s one thing to have your name sullied and instantly become a punchline – even LeBron James was making jokes about burner accounts at the NBA Finals – but when it comes from your own house, it’s got to be doubly difficult.
"Devastated," and "struggling" are the adjectives that came up routinely in conversations with those close to Colangelo in the purgatory he served between first learning that a reporter was investigating the accounts on May 22nd, the publication of the story on May 29th and the axe falling in the morning.
The 76ers will be fine. How Colangelo rebuilds from this is the process that may take years and has no clear path ahead.
Were the Sixers correct to fire him? Yes. Trust is the scarcest commodity of all in the NBA and having this laundry being made public – by whatever means – meant action had to be taken before the acid settled in the foundation.
Had he built more equity in Philadelphia maybe there would have been a stronger case to keep him and weather the storm until it blew over. But his results with the 76ers have been mixed. The job Colangelo did this past season – targeting veterans JJ Reddick and Amir Johnson on short-term deals, picking up some useful pieces in the buyout market as it appeared the Sixers were poised to make a playoff run – was commendable. His decision to move up in the draft to take Markelle Fultz first overall has looked worse and worse every time Celtics rookie Jayson Tatum (who Boston took with the third pick after being paid a future first-rounder by Colangelo to move down from first) looked like a future MVP candidate. Giving journeyman Jerryd Bayless $27-million over three years hasn’t helped his cause, either.
If Colangelo was viewed as the architect in Philly maybe the team would have fought harder for him. If he had survived long enough to succeed more fully, then it might have gone away, too.
What would mama bear tweets from an over-protective wife really matter in the midst of a championship parade?
But Colangelo was neither the executive who came up with the blueprint or the engineer who executed the design. In that context, the easiest and most justifiable thing to do was to cut Colangelo loose into the NBA abyss.
He’s been there before and he almost didn’t make it back. Now he’s there again, his name no longer the key that unlocks any door, but the reason so many could very easily remain permanently closed.
He’s 52, and a fighter. Twice he’s been the NBA executive of the year. We know that. What we don’t know is what could possibly come next.
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