How The Sixers Can Add To The Roster: Role Players, Stars, and More
All of the details.
Adam Aaronson, whose legal name is Sixers Adam (@SixersAdam on Twitter), covers the Sixers for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez. He has been legally banned from covering the team in person, and when that ban was set to be lifted, Covid-19 struck. He believes cantaloupe is the best food in existence, and is brought to you by the Official Realtor of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
Even with the trade deadline still more than a month away, we have entered the time in the NBA where you need to turn on tweet notifications for Woj and Shams. Teams across the league are going back and forth on possible trade constructs, and soon enough deals will start coming through.
But that’s not all -- as we see after every deadline, the buyout market lasts for a few weeks longer. We have seen firsthand how buyout acquisitions can help a team in need of depth -- once upon a time, a young and exciting Sixers team rounded out their rotation by adding both Marco Belinelli and Ersan Ilyasova for the remainder of the season.
Predicting what the buyout market will look like is always a tricky exercise, even more so than tracking trade rumors. The most important step is identifying what avenues they have to upgrade their roster. So before you’re bombarded with rumors in the coming weeks, let’s take a look at what tools the Sixers actually have at their disposal this trade season and why they have a leg up on the opposition in the buyout market.
Can the Sixers acquire a star at the trade deadline?
Yes! Well, maybe. Financially, the Sixers have what it takes. When sending out the expiring contracts of Danny Green, Mike Scott and one of Terrance Ferguson or Tony Bradley, they can absorb in excess of $30 million in salary. Without trading any of Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons and Tobias Harris, the Green + Scott + Ferguson/Bradley formula is their only way to get to those numbers.
Green + Scott + Ferguson: $30,831,521
Green + Scott + Bradley: $30,329,080
If you take that package, add in some draft picks and then insert a young player, you have the Sixers’ best offer for players like Bradley Beal or Kyle Lowry. It’s clearly not a package that should be remotely interesting for Washington in a Beal trade, but Toronto could be ready to begin their rebuild and send Lowry back home. He’s a franchise icon, but we have seen the lack of emotion that goes into Masai Ujiri’s decision-making process.
That’s far from a sure thing, though. Green, Scott, Ferguson and Bradley get you there money-wise, but don’t do much at all as far as being attractive to a rebuilding team. That’s what will make acquiring a big name difficult this trade season -- in order to acquire a star, the Sixers need to give up a package that is not star-worthy.
What kinds of role players can they add?
In theory, most players who are on the market will be attainable one way or another. Even if you remove Green and any other significant contributors from potential packages, the Sixers can take in a healthy amount of salary.
Scott + Ferguson + Bradley + Vincent Poirier: $18,988,288
Scott + Ferguson + Bradley: $15,714,279
Ferguson + Bradley + Poirier: $12,731,600
Scott + Ferguson: $11,286,704
Scott + Bradley: $10,784,263
So, as you can see, there are lots of different avenues for the Sixers to add between $10 million and $20 million in incoming salary without disrupting their rotation much at all.
What about the trade exception?
When the Sixers swung the Al Horford for Green deal, they generated an $8.2 million traded player exception.
Here’s how a trade exception works: whatever the designated amount is indicates the amount of money a team can absorb without giving anything up. So the Sixers can add PJ Tucker for example. Tucker makes $7.9 million, so the Sixers can take him on without sending out any salary.
Trade exceptions cannot be combined with players, however. For example, the Sixers can’t aggregate their $8.2 million TPE and Mike Scott’s $5 million salary together and receive $13.2 million in salary.
As far as players under the threshold go, Tucker is the most sensible, as Mike O’Connor recently wrote about. While we’re here, a few names I like are -- in order from most to least expensive -- Tyus Jones, Nemanja Bjelica and Ish Smith.
Why do the Sixers have an advantage in the buyout market?
It’s pretty simple -- they have more money to offer than (almost) anyone else. The Sixers never used their $5.7 million taxpayer’s mid-level exception during free agency. So while almost every other team is only able to offer a minimum contract to someone on the buyout market, the Sixers can offer considerably more. The contracts are prorated and would come more than midway through the season, so the financial incentive isn’t necessarily massive, but it absolutely will matter when guys are choosing between the Sixers and other contenders.