On a day in which Jerry Colangelo was announced essentially as the liaison to the decision-making process Sam Hinkie undergoes with the Philadelphia 76ers' long haul rebuild, things could not have looked worse for the organization on the court. For all of the scrutiny Hinkie and the Sixers have taken over the last three years as they go heavy into playing the lottery odds and light on adding real NBA talent to the roster, they've performed over expectations.

The Sixers have won more games than projected the last two seasons and even posted a very respected defense in 2014-15. But Monday night against the San Antonio Spurs, things got uglier. Maybe they were even the ugliest we've seen in this entire endeavor on a single game basis. This was the Sixers' second 50-point loss of the Hinkie rebuild. The first one happened near the beginning of last season when a full strength Mavericks team blitzed an incapable offense.

The 119-68 loss to the Spurs happened without Tim Duncan, Kawhi Leonard, and Manu Ginobili playing a second of basketball. They started Matt Bonner and Kyle Anderson. They played Jonathan Simmons, Ray McCallum, Rasual Butler, and Boban Marjanovic the most minutes of any of their reserves. Marjanovic even threw one down on the lowly Sixers.

You know big losses are going to come this season. We've played 22 games and the Sixers are 20 games under .500. The Sixers' already historically bad offense put up just 68 points on 34.7 percent shooting and 16.7 percent from deep. If you went into tonight thinking the Spurs would destroy the Sixers, you weren't alone. That's the design of this team.

For three years, the Sixers have looked for the best lottery odds and the first two years have resulted in someone ending up worse than them. The Milwaukee Bucks scooped them for worst record in the NBA in 2013-14 and the Minnesota Timberwolves ended up with the worst record last season. Both times the Sixers ended up with the third pick in the draft. They drafted Joel Embiid, who has been too injured to make his debut, and Jahlil Okafor, whose strong rookie month just got overshadowed by off-the-court incidents.

Here's another representation of just how bad this night was. This is what the generally entertaining Sixers' Twitter account did during the game:

That's it.

There is no joy in Philadelphia. The only joy comes in looking like this might actually be the team that finishes with the highest lottery odds and the worst record because it's impossible to imagine this team finishing with more wins than everybody else. They're currently on pace for somewhere between three and four wins. SportsLine projects the Sixers to finish with 15. The worst record ever was nine wins in a full season and seven wins in a 66-game season. The Sixers will finish somewhere in that range.

And even then, they're not guaranteed they'll even finish with a top 3 pick come draft night.

This is the gamble Hinkie has undertaken and it's now the gamble Colangelo will oversee, as well. This felt like rock bottom for the Sixers, but maybe rock bottom would be failing to finish with the worst record once again and not ending up controlling their drafting destiny with the top pick once again.

If this isn't it, how bad does it have to get and when does it eventually get better? For the first time in three years, it's safe to wonder if the entire Sixers organization trusts the process.

Is this the bottom though? (USATSI)
Is this the bottom though? (USATSI)