The Sixers Are A Directionless Franchise
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health. Get 20% off E-Lyte, Gut+, and all Body Bio products with promo code MIKESTUMMY at Body Bio’s website.
If there were an NBA General Manager’s equivalent to the Hippocratic Oath, the first tenet of it would be to always know your franchise’s direction. The absolute worst thing you can do as an NBA franchise is to make decisions in a way that is antithetical to your team’s timeline, or, similarly, to not have any plan or timeline in mind to begin with.
As far as this off-season goes, any criticism of Daryl Morey should start there. The thing that is most clear after this summer is that the organization either has no plan or has failed spectacularly to execute the one they had. When we look back in a few years at what all went wrong for this era of Sixers basketball, most of the conversation will justifiably revolve around moves that were made in years prior, but we will look back on this as the off-season that the Sixers became a rudderless ship.
Morey and the Sixers have publicly stated that the goal is to contend for a championship right now, but they did not behave in a way this off-season that would lead any logical person to believe that. If Morey’s secret hope is to take some version of a gap year to maximize long term flexibility, they’ve done practically nothing to serve that goal, either. Coming out of this off-season with nothing but an extremely pissed off James Harden and a few veteran minimum guys is an astounding level of directionlessness and/or unpreparedness.
After I criticized Morey and the Sixers’ off-season on Twitter yesterday, I received a fair amount of pushback along the lines of, “what were they supposed to do?” The answer, to me, is quite obvious: pick a direction, any direction. Sure, the Sixers were somewhat strapped for options, but it’s completely insane to suggest that they were so strapped as to justify this.
The Sixers could have made moves to go even further all-in, or they could have initiated some sort of short term re-tooling this off-season. Instead, they did neither, and are stuck in the worst of both worlds. An all-in off-season would have looked something like this: paying James Harden, trading Jaden Springer/salary/ a 2029 first round pick for a quality role player of some kind (say, Royce O’Neale?), paying the luxury tax to keep Jalen McDaniels and/or Georges Niang, and perhaps even trading Tyrese Maxey and Tobias Harris for a star-level wing if one were to become available.
Would I suddenly believe in the Embiid era ending in a title? No, but I would have much more faith than I do now. That path would be a much more satisfying choice than the status quo for the simple fact that at least the team’s timeline is neat and clean; they would have two years of arguably their best shot at contention yet, followed by a logical conclusion in which they trade Embiid, replenish their assets, and rebuild after that.
Of course, the thing that made all of that impossible was the Harden opt-in and trade demand. But let’s be clear about two things: 1) Morey absolutely deserves blame for whatever went wrong leading up to the opt-in, and 2) once it became clear that the Harden situation was irredeemable, the best option immediately became trading him rather than holding onto him indefinitely.
On the first point, I find it damn near impossible that Morey could be so hellbent on following the tampering rules that he couldn’t have at least gotten a hint through to Harden’s camp that he was planning on offering him a contract. This situation has never happened to any team before, ever. If Morey wanted to pay Harden his money, he should have found a backchannel way to get that across. In the alternative scenario, if Morey intentionally ghosted Harden with the hopes that he would simply walk in free agency, I find it almost impossible to believe that he wouldn’t then be willing to move forward on a trade to the Clippers for role players and a draft pick or two; if your plan was to simply let Harden walk with the goal being maintaining long term cap flexibility, why wouldn’t you then be satisfied to trade him for expiring contracts and a future pick? Isn’t that precisely what you’re looking for? It’s not as if Harden walking would have opened up cap space for this off-season, anyway.
Any way you slice it, and regardless of what Morey hoped would happen, it is an astounding level of unpreparedness and failure to do your job. This, of course, makes no mention of the fact that creating/failing to resolve the situation is a massive PR black cloud over an organization that has already had far too many of them. It requires an extreme level of ignorance for Morey to insist on keeping Harden simply because his calculations say it may increase their championship odds by 0.3%. Running an NBA team is never that simple and binary-minded. There are many aspects to the job of an NBA front office, and non-basketball reasons factor into decision making all the time. There’s a reason that teams will bring back a franchise legend in the twilight of their careers, or will sign a player who is a close friend or relative of their best player, or will avoid signing a player with a problematic off-court history. You are running an organization that is dependent upon support from its fans, and winning basketball games is not the only consideration at hand there. You need to run a functional, public-facing organization. The degree to which keeping Harden increases their championship odds for this season (versus taking whatever you could get for him in a trade) does not justify the misery and embarrassment that the organization, its fans, and the players have to endure. Putting on blinders and acting like the culture and public perception of the organization don’t matter doesn’t make you a genius, it makes you profoundly ignorant to the nature of the industry you are in.
Had the Sixers traded Harden and initiated some sort of re-tooling, I would imagine that the most likely scenario would be taking back Norm Powell, Robert Covington, Marcus Morris, and a draft pick from the Clippers. You could, of course, stop there and just try to salvage a couple more 48-50 win seasons. But if you wanted to follow all the way through on a re-tool in hopes of winning a title with Embiid, the next step would be to utilize whatever is left on the roster to get back any sort of draft capital. I imagine that P.J. Tucker would become a casualty in that effort, as I would assume many contenders would be happy to have him for a pair of second round picks. Some might disagree that he has any value – I find that ridiculous, as Jae Crowder (a 3-month rental in the midst of a holdout, who also is likely worse than Tucker) just got five second round picks, but I understand why some might say they wouldn’t trade for him.
You also could have looked to trade Tobias Harris for longer term, negative value contracts in an effort to get draft capital back. Dallas would have been an ideal partner there – they wound up trading Davis Bertans and the 10th pick in the draft in exchange for the 12th pick in the draft, but one wonders if they would have instead been willing to combine their bad contracts and deal Bertans, Tim Hardaway, Jr. JaVale McGee, and a future first for Harris as opposed to the deal they made with Oklahoma City. In that event, they still keep Dereck Lively, and also shed more long term salary in exchange for a useful player at a position of need. Other bad contracts, such as taking back Lonzo Ball and assets in a deal with Chicago, or making a deal with Golden State for Jordan Poole and picks in hopes of becoming a waystation for him to rehab his value, would have also been intriguing. There are plenty of bad long term deals in the NBA, and if the Sixers had committed to a re-tool, they surely could have found at least one trade partner that would be willing to add in some draft capital in order to shed weight and take back Harris’ expiring. Anyone who reads me regularly knows that I’m not a Tobias fan, but the idea that the Sixers were completely, totally stuck with him is something I find ridiculous.
I think we are all falling victim to how much we despise the players on this team and are not aware of how many mediocre players get traded for actual value in the course of an NBA season; as I just pointed out, Jae Crowder just netted five second round picks, and the Warriors just traded a first and two seconds to get a 38-year-old backup point guard back in exchange for Jordan Poole. P.J. Tucker and Tobias Harris were starters on a 54-win team last season; someone will trade something for them, especially if that something is something they’re dying to get rid of.
Between grabbing Powell and a pick from the Clippers, a couple of second rounders for Tucker, and perhaps a future first (albeit with a negative value contract) for Harris, the Sixers would then be positioned to get into another superstar sweepstakes next summer. Combine all of those assets with the Sixers’ own draft assets, and they’re in a half decent position to nab the next star player who wants out. On draft night 2024, they will be able to trade their own 2024 pick, as well as their own 2029 and 2031 first rounders. It all comes together to make a compelling package. Many will argue that you should never re-tool and take a gap year with a player like Joel Embiid, but they basically are taking a gap year already, just without any of the benefits.
Look – I know this is all hypothetical. Running an NBA team is hard, and I’m not proposing these deals with the mindset that each of them would be a layup to execute. But this is precisely what Daryl Morey’s job is. I understand the rush from some fans to criticize the “just do something” mentality, but I think many are underestimating the number of possibilities that existed, even despite the Sixers’ disadvantageous position. I completely reject the idea that the Sixers were as stuck as their inactivity would indicate – rather, I think they had a choice of either going further all-in or viably re-tooling, and instead chose neither.
As a result, we are living the worst of both worlds, as well as a special little dose of chaos and bad PR that only exists in this world – the Sixers are neither set up to contend now, nor are they set up to get back into contention in the future, and they also have the pleasure of having a pissed off James Harden try to drag the organization through the mud. This was, without question, an unacceptably bad off-season for Daryl Morey. It is perfectly fine to point out that he walked into a very difficult situation, but that he did absolutely nothing to make it better – holding both of those ideas in your head at the same time is not hard.
“Piss off James Harden, refuse to trade him, and sign a bunch of veteran minimum guys” is not a plan. It accomplishes nothing and brings the organization absolutely nowhere, except perhaps one step closer to a Joel Embiid trade request. It’s the behavior of an organization that has no direction, nor any motivation to find one. And as they sit around and do nothing but fall into more public embarrassment, the rest of the Eastern Conference elite just got a whole lot better.