Sixers make a deal to acquire Butler

PHILADELPHIA >> Their idealism was cute at the beginning, a way to keep the naive subdued and dazed, a basketball-by-numbers shout-out to all who had come of age in the era of fantasy sports.

The Sixers wouldn’t need to use their wits, or their wisdom, or even their eyes to build a championship team. They would just lose games, collect draft choices, win titles, and repeat.

Risks? What risks? The plan would work. Even if they weren’t certain of it, they would make others believe. And that was almost as satisfying.

Then the years started to accumulate, and so did the mistakes. Michael Carter-Williams and Nerlens Noel, Markelle Fultz and Jahlil Okafor, others too, would never be franchise miracle salve. By the weekend, the Sixers had concluded that Dario Saric would not be at that level either. And so it was, with Brett Brown yodeling about playing in the NBA Finals with a nucleus that 200 days ago couldn’t win a second playoff round, that it came to the point

where the Sixers had to try something else. They’ll try Jimmy Butler. That’s something else, all right.

In fact, it’s two things. It is a multi-position scorer and four-time All-Star who technically meets the job specs for the third star the Sixers and any other team needs to win an NBA championship. It is also a noted locker room irritant who big-times young players and coaches.

Not that acquiring good players is ever wrong. It’s what every professional team in every sport should strive to do at all times. But when the Sixers officially announce that they have traded Saric, Robert Covington, a 2022 second-round draft choice and the expiring and repulsive $8 million Jerryd Bayless contract to Minnesota for Butler and brittle and ever-unavailable Justin Patton, it will be the most crystal example yet of the franchise’s frustration.

The Sixers want to win. They want to win immediately. And they will try to win with a player who has done his last two employers dirt. That would be Chicago, where he took a shot at Fred Hoiberg, insisting the Bulls had to be coached better. And that would be Minnesota, where on a regular basis he would effectively announce that everyone else on the team was the reason why there is never a championship parade around downtown Minneapolis.

So miserable was Butler with the Timberwolves, who were only offering him $110,000,000 to stick around, that he began to call out teammates by name and demand a trade. And since in that league the stars decide what happens, he made himself such a pest that the Wolves so lowered their price that the Sixers decided to buy.

Player for player, the Sixers won the deal. Covington is a valuable defender and a good shooter, but was never going to be an All-Star, let alone one of those superstars required to win a championship. Saric was the runner-up for Rookie of the Year in 2017 and, at that time, appeared on the way to that status. But he plateaued. He’d played better in recent games. And few players prepare as honestly or so frequently collect traffic rebounds. But he was too prone to slumps, too committed to summertime basketball in Croatia to maintain the everynight bounce required in the NBA, and more likely to be a good player than a great one. So under the long-accepted corollary that whoever acquires the best player wins, then the trade goes to the 76ers.

Jimmy Butler, on game nights, will be more likely to yield victories than the Covington-Saric combo plate.

But as they frolicked to 52 regular-season victories last season, including the final scheduled 16, the Sixers were humming a consistent in-house tune. They had a team. They had players with defined roles. They had veterans accepting those roles while willing to guide young players. They had a coach who’d professionally grown up with Joel Embiid and who’d known Ben Simmons and his family for years. No, the Sixers were not deep enough to defeat Boston in a first-to-four. But they were deep enough in camaraderie to make it a reasonable proposition.

That will change Monday when Butler struts into the Sixers’ dressing room before a game in Miami. Suddenly, Brown will be at risk of secondguessing. Suddenly, young players will be bracing against being the next to be called out by Butler. (And what could he possibly be thinking about Fultz?) Suddenly, the room, which clearly has been under the spell of Embiid, will have a newer, more veteran voice. Suddenly Simmons, whose No. 1 priority will always be to sell himself as an ace pitcher, will be squished to a No. 3. How will that play long-term? Best guess: He bounces as soon as his contract allows.

But that’s how it has gone in the NBA for decades. General managers collect good players, and then trust the coaches to figure it out. If that doesn’t work, they’ll trust different coaches to figure it out. All reports are that Josh Harris (check that, Elton Brand) would not have made the deal without assurances that Butler will sign a long-term deal. The Sixers have the cash. And they have the nucleus that should appeal to a player who so wants to win that he will blame everyone else until he does.

By now, with all of those high draft choices they won by being unprofessional, the Sixers should have developed as contenders organically as contenders. Didn’t happen. So they’ll try another way.

Technically, Butler’s gripes have been accurate, even if he could have stopped short of openly blasting his coach in Chicago. The teammates he’d criticized needed to be outed. And maybe the Sixers need a grumpy veteran to tell Simmons to shoot once in a while, to make faces when Fultz keeps making mistakes, to stare down Jayson Tatum and match him bucket-for-bucket in the spring.

It was worth a risk … emphasis on risk.