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Jerry Colangelo had been installed as chairman of basketball operations in December. By April, Bryan Colangelo was arriving too. Hinkie told the twelve owners he no longer had confidence he could make good decisions on their behalf under that structure — so he stepped down, and told them he already had. Bryan Colangelo was hired three days later.

He opens by naming Atul Gawande, the surgeon-writer, and admitting that reading investor letters is his own guilty pleasure. That's the form he chose: a long, discursive explanation of reasoning aimed at owners, not a statement aimed at fans or media. It's also why it reads nothing like a sports document.

The recurring demand of the whole letter: be willing to say you don't know, change your mind when the evidence moves, and staff the building with people who will tell you you're wrong. Certainty is the enemy — in a league where everyone sounds sure, the edge is in admitting how little anyone actually knows.

Most of the league optimizes for the next game, the next season, the next press conference. Hinkie argues for optimizing across a decade, which means absorbing near-term pain that looks indefensible to anyone grading quarter by quarter. The entire Process, condensed into one idea.

A named section of the letter. Respect tradition, but recognize how much of entrenched basketball practice is simply inertia dressed up as wisdom. If a thing is done because it has always been done, that's an opening, not a reason.

Contrarianism as an operating instruction, framed as a set of questions to keep asking: which player is most undervalued, and can you go get him? Which accepted basketball truism is most likely false, and can you bet against it? What's the biggest waste of the organization's time, and can you simply stop? Without that, you're just hoping good things happen.

The line that outlived the letter. Outcomes in basketball are noisy enough that grading a decision by how it turned out is a category error — you have to grade the reasoning that produced it. Good process, bad result is survivable. Bad process, good result is a trap.

Roster building is repeated bets made on incomplete information. The discomfort of not knowing isn't a bug to be engineered away — it's the price of admission, and most organizations pay too much to avoid feeling it.

An appetite for research and unusual sources, paired with a caveat: the numbers don't yet do the whole job. Even with everything teams have at their disposal, someone still has to go scour the globe and watch players play.

He warns the owners early on to expect mild cheerleading for the people around him mixed with a healthy dose of criticism aimed at his own mistakes. Whatever else the letter is, it isn't a victory lap — a good chunk of it is him cataloguing what he got wrong.