76ers are at point of no return
Key offseason begins Sunday night
The NBA free agency frenzy will begin at 6 Sunday evening, and within days there will be league-wide ripples. For many reasons, no team will be hit by as many as the 76ers.
With a coach down to his last chance to win something more than a playoff round, with a general manager who risked plenty to reach the freeagency period with options, and with a fan base demanding greatness, the Sixers face a turning point in their history.
Their story is too familiar. It is of an operation among the first to publicly flaunt losing to some day drag in a large haul, the Sixers are in a position to cash out. Though basically they have only Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons to show for their nasty and disturbing plan to tank, they also are at the point where they have $59 million in cap space and an owner unconcerned about any taxes on luxuries.
That means they have reached a no-return point. Either they make this work this time, or
they will never make it work at all. They are out of options to disappoint. So by the July 6 signing session, they will be one of two things: Great or decimated.
“I’m excited,” Elton Brand said, at season’s end. “We have a great group, dynamic core. I look forward to being a GM for the first time going into free agency. I look forward to this offseason.
“I know we’re going to grow and get better.”
Good for him. Maybe he will guide the Sixers to improvement. But if so, he’s light on company, for skepticism is rampaging. Though the Sixers can instantly return to Eastern Conference contention and beyond by signing late2019 pillars Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris to maxplus contracts, there have been enough noises to conclude that nothing will come that simple.
Begin with Butler, as accomplished at challenging NBA authority as he is at scoring critical late points, which is to say he is gifted at both. Given a chance at the end of the season to sing the 10-9-8-76ers ditty, he passed. There were reasons. Family concerns. Money, and how it was distributed. Having to share on-the-ball time with a by-title point guard who won’t shoot. And one more: There were multiple indications and whispers that he was not sold on the coaching stylings of Brett Brown.
“I can be difficult at times,” Butler said. “I swear it comes from the right place. I work on my game. He has a huge heart and is a great dude and works incredibly hard. And you have to respect that about him, always working to make everybody great. That’s hard to do. I think he’s going to be here for a long time.”
Notice: Jimmy Butler said Brett Brown is going to be around the Sixers for a long time. He didn’t say anything about Jimmy Butler being around the Sixers for a long time. So do that math. And in the weeks that followed, the only hints to drop about Butler were that he was more interested in playing elsewhere. One recent bomb to drop was that the Rockets were maneuvering to back the Sixers into a sign-and-trade for Butler and bring him back to his hometown. And while the Sixers may pick up some players from a third team in that loop, that was not their plan. They had players. Robert Covington and Dario Saric were players. But Brand moved them for the rights to Butler for just over half a year. The GM, then, must not be caught trying to over-rotisserie-league the bond he created. There are only so many times he can remake everything and expect the head coach to fit something new around Embiid and Simmons.
As they stand heading into free agency, the Sixers have four players under contract, not including the rights to their two draft choices. That would make them quite dangerous in the Big Three league. But it leaves them too close to a total rebuild this deep into their celebrated process. Just the same, in his recruiting stump speech, Brown says to bring it.
“How many programs in the NBA can feel like there is a chance at annual success?” he said. “Here we are with a 22-year-old AllStar and a 25-year-old AllStar and people that want to be here, and Elton is going to do his job and Josh Harris and David Blitzer are so driven to providing the resources to win a championship. To me, it’s like, ‘What are we missing?’ We have everything that we need to move this program forward. We are proud of the fights that we’ve had to fight in order to do what we’ve done. And culture is a word that means something to me. It means something to us. And I believe that we’ve delivered.”
The Sixers have themselves convinced that they have a championship nucleus, a world-class training center, passionate fans, a sagging conference, cash and an owner ready to spend. What they tend to bury is that they are not alone in any of those categories. So if they cannot manipulate their Bird rights to bring back Butler and Harris at substantially more dough than anyone else can offer, then they have a problem. And their No. 1 problem will be that their process didn’t work.
Should Butler and Harris roll, there will be options. The Sixers were caught saving a dollar here or there in the offseason, enough to make a possible run at Kawhi Leonard, whom Brown has characterized as a close and respected associate from his San Antonio days. Al Horford would be an interesting acquisition, if only because they would have had the one player in their division most routinely able to create physical and emotional problems for Embiid. And once the free agency starts to spin, the wind could push any number of great players toward Josh Harris’ open wallet.
That will all begin Sunday night.
The Sixers are in deep. Soon enough, they’ll know if everything they’ve tried, in recent years and earlier, was worth the risks.