The Sixers Should Run It Back Because They Never Have

The Sixers have been legitimately good for five years now, and never once have they committed to playing the next season with most of the same core intact.

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.

---

Well, two teams swapped first-rounders and included a player whose previous team I'd have about a 70% chance of actually remembering, so I guess it is officially once again Slop Season. (Credit to Sixers Twitter luminary TrillBroDude for coining one of the most useful phrases in recent NBA discourse.) MOC has completed his annual trade column proposing five of the most-practical, least-sexy Sixers deals imaginable -- though I did kinda get a tingle at the one that gets us Jerami Grant and Kelly Olynyk -- so I guess it's my turn to imitate Rick Ross imitating Michael Corleone and offer my usual suggestion for the Sixers' best course of action this offseason: nothing. 

I've probably written some version of this column each of the last four offseasons (at least), and I'm about as bored with writing it as you no doubt are reading it -- or more likely, seeing its headline come across your Twitter timeline and rolling your eyes as you scroll right past it. I don't even know if I actually believe it anymore, or if I just get a little more cowardly every year, and want to cling to the notion that kicking whatever Big Decisions need to be made about the team currently aren't really so urgent that they have to be addressed ASAP. When you look around and the most consequential moves readily available are trading what few fungible assets remain on the Sixers' periphery for the likes of Will Barton, Eric Gordon or Marcus Morris (or just upending everything for Bradley Beal), it's hard to feel too passionate about the Sixers Doing Something anyway. 

So let me slim my pro-Nothing argument down to the one legitimately semi-persuasive point remaining in favor of running it back: The Sixers have still never actually done it before. 

That's maybe not technically true: You could certainly argue that running it back was what the Sixers did in the summer of 2018, when they re-signed J.J. Redick and Amir Johnson, mostly punted on the draft and free agency, and kept their trade acquisitions to the corpse of Wilson Chandler and the evil doppelgänger of Mike Muscala. But that mostly gets disqualified in my mind for two reasons. First, infamous Spike Celtics podcast freakout aside, it was still way too early in the team's timeline for any big moves to be immediately necessary -- just the second year for Joel Embiid and Dario Saric, the first for Ben Simmons, still with plenty of cap room and assets to spare -- and the Sixers were way ahead of schedule even making it to the second round of the playoffs that year. Second, they upended the entire team 13 games into the season by trading Saric and Robert Covington for Jimmy Butler (and then again later in the season with the Tobias Harris trade), not even lasting a month before any back-running efforts were fully aborted.

The next summer was the one where Run It Back briefly became a rallying cry among Sixers fans, following the heartbreak of the Raptors series and the feeling that we were really just one player away (namely, a backup center that didn't cause the Sixers' lead to bleed like Mr. Orange every time he entered the game) from building something pretty special. Our cries were not heeded; Harris was retained at prohibitive cost but Butler was signed-and-traded to Miami for Josh Richardson, and Al Horford was imported from Boston to fit the salary slot thus vacated. Then on draft night in 2020, Horf was jettisoned to Oklahoma City for Danny Green and J-Rich dealt to Dallas for Seth Curry. And of course, last summer, the decision of whether or not to run it back was taken out of the Sixers' hands by Simmons' trade demands, ensuring another season of necessary team-wide adjustments without even a preceding personnel move.

So that's it: The Sixers have been legitimately good for five years now, and never once have they committed to playing the next season with most of the same core intact. That's not inexplicable -- the Sixers have always had holes and flaws to fix, and even when they didn't always have the best solutions of how to actually do so, you can't totally fault them for actively trying to plug and/or paper over them -- and it might not even really be all that unusual, really. But man, it must be exhausting: for Embiid in particular, who has never gotten a chance to build chemistry and fluency with a supporting cast for more than a season (and unusually not even for that long) before a couple dudes in key roles get shipped out for new blood. (For better or worse, the only real consistency he's had is with head coaching: only one change in six years, and it seems increasingly unlikely that first number will be changing this offseason.)

Is this the year where running it back finally makes sense enough for this team to actually do it? Depends on your Harden feelings, of course -- if you think there's some combination of bounce-back to be had with his hamstring and added upside to be hit by getting him more reps alongside Embiid, Harris and Tyrese Maxey, then yeah, maybe. If Harden does opt in for the final year of his contract, as some are predicting, then it really might be the smart move: If there's a built-in exit point to his Sixers tenure anyway, may as well give it another good-faith try with a core that seemed like it should've been good enough last year, and hope that continued Maxey improvement and long-overdue Embiid health karma make up the difference between the team being fake contenders and real ones -- and if not, try to escape-hatch at the trade deadline.

Or not. The path of least resistance is very rarely actually the most advantageous route, and certainly if there's a no-brainer deal to improve this team's playoff upside beyond adding around the fringes, it'd be malpractice for Daryl Morey not to take it. But it's been a half-decade of Doing Shit in the offseason or early season, with still nothing more than second-round exits to show for it. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, I'm not sure how trying something different every time and ending up with the result is really all that much saner.