Is Maxing Out a Guy in His Mid-to-Late 30s Really the Answer?

Spoiler: AU doesn't think so.

Well, it's exciting to be the team at the center of every offseason rumor again, isn't it? We were stuck on Brian Windhorst's summertime pay-no-mind list for a good half decade there, as the combined sins of the Colangelo and Team Collaborative GM administrations saddled us with label debts not even Taylor Swift could easily recoup. But after four years, a lot of maneuvering and at least one big swing and relative miss on the trade market, Daryl Morey has tunneled his way to cap space, draft picks and free-agency freedom, and now he can't wait to operate. It feels good. It feels right.  

It maybe even feels well-timed. Though for most of the regular season, it looked like this was going to end up being a historically shallow free agency class, real star players are potentially starting to shake loose who would've previously been unimaginable as realistic targets for the Sixers. Jimmy Butler's time in Miami seems to be coming to a surprisingly unceremonious end, and he may soon be on the trading block. Kevin Durant's second season in Phoenix ended even more disappointingly than his first, and now he seems to be considering his options. Even LeBron James, consensus player of his generation and a potential free bird this summer, seems to have increasingly little reason to hang around an L.A. team that seems likely to cap out as "pretty good" for the foreseeable future. And yes, there's still Paul George, long-rumored free-agency apple of Daryl's eye, who the Clippers have shown zero interest in giving the max contract that our president of basketball operations already has drafted in his email, with his cursor hovering over the SEND button in advance of June 30. 

Unquestionably, any one of those guys would be hugely helpful on the Sixers next season. But they all have the same problem: They're all old, they're all expensive, and they all lock us into a team where if things don't work out right away, we are absolutely fucked. 

Now in a certain light, we could look at that last part as being something of a good thing. The Sixers have been kinda floating along in a near-contender's purgatory the past five seasons, always looking to compete for a title but never fully committed to doing so. Our deadline purchases over that era largely reflect this: Alec Burks, George Hill, Jalen McDaniels and now Buddy Hield were all low-investment players that we could cut bait with immediately if they didn't really work out -- they didn't, and then we did. The only majorly consequential moves made over that timespan were ones that Daryl was essentially forced to make: Trading Ben Simmons for James Harden when Simmons said he wouldn't play for us anymore, and then dealing Harden for some other stuff when he decided he was done here too. To some extent, it could be good for Daryl to make a move that leaves him pot-committed and ensures he has no real choice but to continue doubling down on it throughout the season. That might be the only way we ever enter the postseason with a fully loaded roster, one eminently equipped to go all the way. 

But man, committing to players who are already in their mid-to-late 30s -- with yearly salaries in the 40s and 50s -- really leaves you with no room for error. When you build your team around one of those guys, everything needs to go perfect immediately, because every subsequent year with them your chances of winning it all go down dramatically. And if something goes wrong with them, that's it: It wasn't Jimmy Butler's fault that he sprained his MCL in the play-in game against Philly, but once he did, Miami's season was over, and their championship window had essentially closed. Major injuries are hardly the only risk with aging players. Their declining athleticism might hit a point of no return. The disparity between their long-standing image of themselves and the reality of their current abilities may prove irreconcilable. They may get restless, annoyed with teammates and coaches, generally disagreeable over things not going the way they've long grown accustomed to. Lions in Winter are not a historically patient bunch. 

And when such a contract does prove to be a mistake, it is not one easily undone. Dealing an overpaid player when there's still time for them to learn or grow or at least rediscover their strengths through a different team context is already hard enough, but when they're already nearing the end of the line, it can be damn near impossible. If Paul George is making $50 million a year at age 37 or 38 and contributing more like a role player than a star? We'll either need to get extremely lucky with some of our minimum-contract guys or burn what remaining draft capital we have left from our current bounty in paying someone else to take him off our hands. 

All right, so maybe you live with a bad end to the contract if you get one or two really good years out of them first. After all, Joel Embiid's prime won't last forever either -- we may only have a couple years left with him potentially being the best player on a championship team anyway. But you know who we do have a lot of really good years left with? Tyrese Maxey, still just 23 and already an All-Star, who should be entering the creamiest part of his own prime right around the time Joel is exiting his. Do we really want to hamstring his best years (and potentially still very good years for Joel) with a contract we can already tell with near-certainty is going to be a bad one for multiple years? Maybe Maxey never makes that leap to leading a championship-caliber roster, but the quickest way to ensure he doesn't is to saddle his teams with an albatross contract that makes the Tobias deal look like a $1.99 used copy of R.E.M.'s Monster by comparison. 

Now, of course, all 30-something acquisitions aren't created equal: Not everyone is Elton Brand or Chris Webber, and it's possible we could still get decently fair on-court value for one or two of these guys. Kevin Durant's game never seems to really age, and even though he might not be able to drag an underqualified team to the finals (or maybe even just to the second round) anymore, the idea of him as the most over-qualified third option in NBA history is certainly an appealing one, especially with just two years left on his contract. LeBron James, who'll turn 40 next season, might not want a deal much longer than that anyway, and even with his athleticism declining from supernatural to a mere holy shit, his skills as a connector and secondary play-maker (and an improved three-point shooter) would certainly be invaluable on this team. (Not to mention that it would be objectively hilarious to have LeBron James, leading scorer in NBA history, deferring to 21st-picked 24-year-old Tyrese Maxey as the more potent offensive weapon.) 

But like... you get one of those guys on your team, and no matter how old or compromised they are, it still kinda becomes their team. They become the de facto loudest voice in the locker room, the center of media attention, the guy who literally and figuratively answers for it first when things go awry. And because they have the biggest spotlight on them and the least time left to fuck around, they're also the most likely to bounce if and when things get hairy. They don't really care about winning here, they just care about winning, and currently see us as a viable path to doing so. As soon as they see a couple too many obstacles in the way of that path, they'll likely find another one, and they'll probably have the leverage to make it happen. Again, betting on one of those guys is betting on everything to go perfectly right immediately, a wager most Sixers fans would generally advise anyone against making. 

The Best Moment for Every Sixers Player This Season

This is why I would want Mikal Bridges, if available, to be the team's top target. He's not really the player any of these other four guys are, but he's nearly a decade younger, still in his prime and still with room to grow in a new team setting -- with a skill set that would be perfectly complementary to Embiid and Maxey without in any way threatening their places in the team hierarchy. He would cost us significantly in assets -- maybe everything, really -- but he would be an optimal Third Guy, one who doesn't change the fundamental identity of the team, but allows every other part of it to click into place. (And at just $24 million a year for the next two years, he wouldn't prohibit us from continuing to build the roster around him in free agency.) I'd be much more comfortable making that kind of investment in him because adding him doesn't accelerate the clock on this team any more than it's already been sped up: It's fine if it takes until Year Two for everything to really come together with Bridges, because he's not automatically gonna be worse in Year Two than he is in Year One. 

It's also why I'm at least interested in kicking the tires on Brandon Ingram. I know he's not a perfect player, either devoid of context or within the specific context of the Sixers -- he takes too many tough twos and not enough threes, he's hurt a lot, he has at least the faint scent of loser energy to him. But I feel the Tobias comparisons due to their similar player types miss the most important distinction between them: That Ingram is actually an All-Star, a guy who put up 25-5-6 on 48/39/88% shooting splits the season before this one, while getting to the line six times a game, numbers that Tobias has never really been in range of. He had a bad end to last season, and he's clearly the not most reliable guy to stay on the court (hasn't played more than 64 games since his rookie year), but he's also only 27 and has never been on a team as good and positionally uncluttered as this Sixers team before. I'm not totally sold on him, but I think I'd rather take our chances figuring out how to get things right with him than just hoping things work perfectly and immediately with George or Butler or whoever. 

Goodbye, Tobi

And lastly, it's why I think we might've really fucked up a little by not going harder at OG Anunoby or Pascal Siakam before last year's trade deadline. I know a lot of people looked at them as underwhelming third-option acquisitions, but when you look at what they're doing now for teams who have advanced further in the playoffs than we have, I think it's pretty clear that they're the kind of ceiling-raising players we should be looking to slot in behind Embiid and Maxey, and at late-20s ages where they should still be able to perform as such for a long time. I certainly think we would still be playing in the postseason right now if we had either, and I would absolutely target both of them -- particularly Anunoby, simply a much better, more useful and more winning player than I realized -- this summer, though I think we most likely missed our chance at them, as it's pretty doubtful to me that either will leave their new homes at this point. Maybe we couldn't have outbid New York or Indiana for them anyway, but I hope Daryl at least tried for 'em, rather than just biding his time for the bigger and more costlier fish this summer.

(Oh, and again with the Tobias comparisons for Anunoby: Just stop it. No Anunoby doesn't score a lot of points, no he doesn't have the kind of overall numbers that usually go with a max contract, but he still affects winning in on a level Tobias never will -- as we just saw when, y'know, the Knicks beat the Sixers in the playoffs and Anunoby out-performed Tobias in every conceivable way. His contract would not be "Tobias lite" or "Tobias 2.0"; the fact that he just helped a team win a playoff series against a good team means that he should never be mentioned in the same sentence with the Tobias contract again.)

Anyway, hopefully one of these younger, ideal-fit guys will be available for the Sixers this summer -- maybe one I'm not even thinking of yet -- and if not, hopefully we can still figure out how to get one at the deadline or even during next summer. But I'd still prioritize going after one of them over the guys with bigger names and flashier career numbers, even if the latter are more easily acquired on June 30. If we do get Paul George or Jimmy Butler or (ugh) LeBron James I'm sure I'll talk myself into getting excited about it quickly enough, since the Sixers will enter the next season with the best championship chances they've ever had. But I'll also be gritting my teeth the entire time, waiting for things to go wrong -- and knowing that once they do, they'll probably only ever get wronger from there. That's not how I want to spend the rest of my own late 30s, certainly. 

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Andrew Unterberger 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. 

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