Over the next few weeks, a quartet of prospective draftees will make their way to the 76ers practice facility to undergo one-on-one physical as well psychological workouts. The Sixers basketball operations department will use what they learn from these exercises to form their final player ranking for Draft night.

76ers Senior Vice President and Assistant General Manager Tony DiLeo has seen his fair share of workouts in his 15 years with the Sixers.

“We rank the players in the draft, and then we look at the players we like and who we think will be around at our pick,” DiLeo explained. “We try to match up positions and sizes so that we have a good workout. We are only allowed to have four players in at one time, so we try to match up position and players.”

After being brought in at the team’s expense the night before, players usually arrive about 8:30 a.m. to prepare for the workout. They are given practice gear and are afforded the opportunity to get taped and treated. By 10 a.m. they are on the practice floor ready to go. One interesting note for those who have declared early entry for the draft: if they have not hired an agent and withdraw from the draft thereby returning to school, they must reimburse the teams their expenses or risk losing their eligibility.

The players get measured for height, wingspan, weight, body fat, and vertical leap. Plus, they are timed doing various running activities before they are ready to start the workout with the coaches.

“We scout these players all season so we always have questions about certain players,’ DiLeo explained. “In the workouts, we try to examine those different areas that we have questions about. So if someone we think has bad hands, then we will try to do some drills to either confirm or contradict our suspicions.”

The players do a lot of individual drills as well as some competitive one-on-one and two-on-two work under the guidance of Head Coach Jim O’Brien.

“It is also important to see the interaction with the coach and the player on the court. How the player responds to the coach, and how he picks up on things because the coach is the one who has to be coaching him during the season.”

After about an hour, when the workout is over, the players then meet individually with DiLeo, O’Brien, 76ers President and General Manager Billy King among others. It’s another opportunity to get information such as family background, basketball background, and talk to them about certain games that were scouted. This is the one opportunity that they have to really sit down and have a good meeting with the player.

After a meeting with the media, the players get a chance for a shower and a lunch break before they meet with Dr. Joel Fish, a nationally recognized expert in sport psychology.

“We can see what is on the outside,” DiLeo said. “We can evaluate their shooting, their speed, their quickness, their height, but what is hard to evaluate are the intangibles: the competitiveness, the desire to be great, the coachability, the attitude, the heart. Those are things that we have questions about, and they are the things that hopefully come out in psychological testing.”

By 2 p.m., the players are on their way home or to their next workout to repeat the process again, while the 76ers are left to evaluate the workout and prepare for the next group of NBA candidates.