After a frenetic summer filled with stunning free agent defections, big trades and exciting rookies, our heads are still spinning as we enter the 2017-18 NBA campaign. With so many new faces in new places, it leaves fans to wonder how things will shake out this year. Over the next two weeks, RealGM will attempt to ask (and answer) 10 of the more pressing questions you may have about the upcoming season.  

- The 76ers ‘Process’ is finally moving to the next phase. How will their season and draft lottery reform impact tanking going forward? 

As “the Process” in Philadelphia begins to enter its next phase, NBA owners recently took a vote on a measure designed to dissuade franchises from going down a similar path. That means as this season unfolds, we might see a shift in when and how teams go about the business of tanking. A key driver of any change will be almost certainly be the new lottery odds imposed by the league. But another factor just might be the Sixers season.

Emboldened by a system that rewards futility, Philly’s losing (254 times over the past four seasons to be exact) and asset collection did just as former GM Sam Hinkie envisioned -- produced a roster exploding with talented youngsters. The Sixers currently have 10 players 23 or younger on their roster that are good bets to factor into their rotation. Nine of those 10 were selected in the first round or the lottery.

The headliners, of course, are the top overall pick from this year’s draft, Markelle Fultz, last season’s top selection, a now-healthy Ben Simmons, and Twitter phenomenon who doubles as a stud basketball player, Joel Embiid. Along with Dario Saric, those three represent the Sixers core of both the present and title-contending future. All those players were brought to Philadelphia courtesy of the aggressive, blatant tanking the league made a rule change to curtail.   

Now armed with a deep, versatile roster filled with this precocious talent, the Sixers are going to stop bottoming out and finally attempt to ascend the Eastern Conference. In fact, Vegas over-unders have Philly’s season win total at 42.5 - a total the team hasn’t surpassed since the 2004-05 campaign. It’s quite clear that people think this Sixer team is already good and only going to getting better.

But then again, there’s the Magic to consider. Though they didn’t tank as egregiously as Philadelphia did, Orlando had a similar plan under Rob Hennigan. Hennigan was influenced by his time in Oklahoma City, when the Thunder conducted a draft miracle by nabbing three mega talents in three consecutive years (plus Serge Ibaka). 

When Orlando started tanking in 2012-13, it put them on the path to high lottery picks. Starting with the 2013 draft, the Magic have picked 2nd, 4th, 12th (the pick that was traded for Elfrid Payton) and 5th. On top of that, the team’s tanking crusade netted them Nikola Vucevic in a non-draft related trade. Yet despite all the young talent they collected, Orlando finished with 29 wins last year and fired Hennigan looking for new leadership to pull them out of their playoff funk. 

Now the point of all this isn’t to say the Sixers are destined to become the Magic. Subjectively, it’s easy to see that Embiid is already better than any player on the Magic. And that Fultz, at 19, was considered a far better prospect than Victor Oladipo was at 21. It’s more that the lessons from Orlando’s flailing rebuild is that collecting promising young talent -- the whole goal of tanking to begin with -- is only half the battle.

What doomed Orlando more than anything is that each season they added a new, talented piece to their young core, the fit got worse. Players like Vucevic, Oladipo, and Aaron Gordon are productive players in a vacuum, but their fit with each other along with a point guard like Payton was poor. This is the worry for Philadelphia starting this season.

Because while Embiid looks like a future stud, he’s only played 31 games since he’s been drafted. Fultz, while talented, is only 19. Meanwhile, if you ask five people the best way to use Ben Simmons, you might get five different answers. And we still don’t know if Jahlil Okafor has the skillset or mindset to be a productive player on a winning team.

As this season unfolds, we’ll not only get an answer to some of these questions, but we’ll start to see how the Sixers are going to fare overall with this young core. If they go on and make the playoffs, it’s going to vindicate every second they spent getting their asses kicked leading up to this season. But if they fail to to surpass their 28 wins from last year, you can bet it’s going to raise some doubts. 

All this will be juxtaposed with the effects of the new lottery odds. Designed to prevent teams from racing to the bottom, all they likely did, as Derek Bodner pointed out on Twitter and Zach Lowe wrote about at length, was change the inflection point of where tanking will occur. Instead of teams falling over themselves to become one of the dregs of the league, fringe playoff teams will be more incentivized to simply become bad and take advantage of improved odds in the middle of the lottery. 

Two sets of team will be impacted both by this shift both these new incentives. The group likely to bring up the rear of their respective conferences -- like the Bulls, Hawks, Suns and Lakers -- can now try to win a few more games without seeing it damage their chances of landing another high pick all that much. Those teams will still be bad, but shouldn’t be going to the same lengths to lose as Philadelphia did mid “Process.”

The second group of teams, those caught between a pointless playoff appearance and a rebuild, are where things get interesting. Memphis and Charlotte are two such teams. Both have low ceilings -- there’s pretty much no scenario in which either of these clubs make a Finals other than “every other team quits the NBA” -- and high floors that may find their seasons impacted by this new rule.

For Memphis, it all hinges around Marc Gasol. If the club finds itself hanging just outside of the playoff race with little promise of a young player potentially blossoming into a productive third wheel anytime soon, the Grizzlies may take a long, hard look at what to do with their 32-year-old franchise center. Trading Gasol, acquiring some young assets while additional dropping back a into the spots with vastly improved lottery odds suddenly looks more appealing than finishing just outside the playoffs and watching the Gasol-Mike Conley duo get another year older. 

As for Charlotte, their All-Star point guard, Kemba Walker, has just two years left on his contract. As we’ve seen with numerous other players -- like Paul George this summer -- summer trade value takes a major hit for a player in the last year of his deal. At just 27, Walker’s trade value will never be higher than at the trade deadline this year other than next summer. If the team is floundering in the race for the East’s eighth seed come that time, maybe the new lottery odds have the Hornets reconsidering Walker’s future with the team as well.

It also stands to reason that both teams like Charlotte and Memphis will be keeping an eye on the Sixers. If Philadelphia’s young core is taking flight and pushing for a playoff spot in the East, the rewards of tanking will be a daily reminder. If the Sixers hit a roadblock on their drive forward, the notion of staying mediocre with fun players like Gasol and Walker probably looks a lot more palatable. After all, if a team that abused the lottery system to its benefit more than any other in history has trouble making any progress, is it better for the mid table teams to just maintain the status quo?  

So while long suffering Philly fans have been waiting for this season to come, they aren’t the only ones. The entire league will likely be keeping an eye on how the Sixers blatant tanking-- a strategy that literally forced the NBA to change its rules -- plays out. We all knew that at some point we’d get to this part of “the Process.” Now we finally get to see what comes next for Philadelphia and how their success or failure will impact the rest of the league.