I called Jerry Colangelo about the ‘Redeem Team.’ We talked about Bryan, the Sixers, and burner accounts, too.

I called Jerry Colangelo’s office on Wednesday. I was not certain he would call me back, and I did not intend to talk to him about his son, Bryan, and the 76ers’ and social-media burner accounts.

There were a couple of other topics I wanted to discuss with him, primarily this year’s induction of the 2008 U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team, “The Redeem Team,” into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

As the head of USA Basketball from 2005 to 2021, Colangelo was in charge of putting the ‘08 team together, and between him — thanks to his fraught three years as an executive and adviser with the Sixers — and of course Kobe Bryant, the Redeem Team had two strong ties to Philadelphia.

Colangelo is 85 and still sharp, and though his assistant said she would pass along my request, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I didn’t hear from him. We hadn’t spoken in several years.

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An hour later, though, my phone buzzed. There he was, and we did spend most of our time talking about 2008, about him and Bryant and those Summer Games in Beijing. I’ll write about that conversation another time.

But if you’re someone who covers the Sixers, someone who covered them during the Sam Hinkie and especially the post-Hinkie years, you don’t get Jerry Colangelo on the phone and not ask him about the strangest story in recent Philly sports history.

So, Jerry, how is your son doing?

“Bryan is doing fine,” he said. “He’s not in basketball, as you well know, and that’s a sad story from my perspective because he really had nothing to do with anything, if you know what I mean.”

I did. Anyone who has followed the NBA and the Sixers over the last decade would. And anyone who remembers what happened would know that Jerry, by saying that his son “really had nothing to do with anything,” was granting Bryan a heavy, perhaps inappropriate measure of generosity and loyalty — the kind of generosity and loyalty that only a father can give to his son.

It was a wild time in the spring of 2018: the revelations on The Ringer, the criticism of Hinkie and Sixers players that appeared in those anonymous Twitter posts, the implication that Bryan Colangelo was operating those accounts, the independent investigation by a powerful New York law firm that concluded that Barbara Bottini — Bryan’s wife — had created and managed the accounts but that Bryan had been “reckless in failing to properly safeguard sensitive, nonpublic, club-related information in communications with individuals outside the 76ers organization.”

The story itself would have been weird enough on its own, but there was so much bound up in it, too. The Colangelos were running the Sixers’ basketball operations only because Hinkie no longer was, because Hinkie had resigned — or been forced out — after too many people within the organization and around the league had been embarrassed or put off by his strategy of having the team tank for the sake of starting fresh.

Bringing Jerry Colangelo on board was one thing. Allowing him to hire his son was something else. Hinkie practically had a cult following. The Colangelos were the NBA’s hand-picked franchise saviors. The Sixers seemed incapable of normalcy, of finding any firm footing for themselves. It was a stew of back-scratching and corporate politics and public resentment. In some ways, that era hadn’t ended yet.

Bryan resigned in June 2018, then all but vanished. He reportedly bought an ownership stake in an Australian professional team in 2020; otherwise, his name appears publicly only in retrospectives or rehashes about the still-mind-bending circumstances and events that led to the end of his career. Jerry did not mention what Bryan was doing now.

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“I look at it this way,” Jerry said. “He had 20 years in the NBA as a GM, three different teams. He was executive of the year a couple of times, and he established himself on his own as a legitimate executive in the NBA.

“Things happen in life that don’t always work out the way you want them to, and in his case, that’s what transpired. But he was very, very strong in his support of his own wife. That became stronger after the fact. It brought them even closer. So it’s a happy ending in the sense that he may be out of basketball and that still pains him, for sure, but he’s doing well for himself. He’s a good young man with a good heart.”

That last sentence made me wince, even roll my eyes. Bryan Colangelo is 60 years old. He was 53 at the time of the scandal. Referring to him as a “good young man” doesn’t exactly rebut the accusations and arguments that nepotism played a role in the Sixers’ decision to hire him. If Hinkie had stayed or if someone else had replaced him, maybe everything would have been different. It would certainly be worth asking Bryan what he thinks. Any chance he’d talk?

“No, he’s so private in that sense,” Jerry Colangelo said. “That’s not something he would do. He wouldn’t. It’s not so much to protect himself. He doesn’t want anything said about anybody. That’s just his M.O. There’s nothing wrong with that. There really isn’t.”

Our conversation ended there, with a father defending his son to the end. Jerry Colangelo always did. Maybe that was the problem.