Last week, Sam Hinkie, the controversial GM of the Philadelphia 76ers, resigned.

On his way out, he sent an investor letter to the owners of the team, in the vein of Warren Buffett’s annual letter for Berkshire Hathaway.

A few pages in, Hinkie concisely lays out the difficulties of his job:

Step away from basketball and imagine for a moment this is investment management, and your job is to take your client’s money and make it grow. It’s January 1, 2015 and the S&P 500 is $171.60, exactly the same price it has been since January 1, 1985. No fluctuation up or down. Flat every single day. And your job for every day of the past 30 years is to make money for your clients by investing. What would you do?

In the NBA, that’s wins. The same 82 games are up for grabs every year for every team. Just like in 1985 (or before). To get more wins, you’re going to have to take them from someone else. Wins are a zero- growth industry (how many of you regularly choose to invest in those?), and the only way up is to steal share from your competitors. You will have to do something different. You will have to be contrarian.

The rest of the letter covers Hinkie’s approach to thinking through that problem, drawing ideas (and great quotes) from people like Charlie Munger, Elon Musk, Steven Johnson, Jeff Bezos and more.

Even if you, like me, don’t care much about basketball, it’s worth a read.