Behind the Scenes of the Philadelphia 76ers’ Go-for-Broke Summer

Getty Images/Ringer illustration How did Daryl Morey deliver Paul George to Philly? With a mix of bad fortune and good luck. "It almost was like sort of fate," Morey says. Now, nine months after shaving off The Beard, the Sixers may have assembled their best team of the Joel Embiid era. The most misleading image of an NBA offseason is the introductory press conference—all smiles and laughs and mutual back pats. The player poses with a crisp, new jersey. Team officials gush. Everyone's happy, relaxed, as if the partnership were fated all along and assured of success. "It's a great day for Philly," Josh Harris, the managing partner of the Philadelphia 76ers, said last week as he settled in for the perfunctory ritual, with the newly signed Paul George, a nine-time All-Star, to his left. "Obviously, it's not very often that a franchise can land a player of Paul's caliber," Harris added, accurately. At the other end of the table, to George's left, sat a beaming Daryl Morey, the Sixers team president and chief architect. This was, of course, exactly the outcome the Sixers hoped for last fall, when they made the roster moves that would position them to pursue George, who projected to be 2024's top free agent. The entire league knew what the Sixers were planning—and whom they wanted. There are few secrets in the NBA. George surely knew, too. And now, here they all were, grinning and holding shiny basketballs for the cameras, as if the whole saga had followed a neat, predictable script. That's the thing about the obligatory grip-and-grin session: It skips past all the stress and uncertainty and second-guessing. It obscures the risks taken, the assumptions made, the number of times between October and July that Morey, Harris, general manager Elton Brand, and head coach Nick Nurse turned to each other and said, more or less, "What if we whiff?" "If you're talking about what do we think our odds of Paul George were, going in, definitely less than 50 —and above some material number," the stats-minded Morey said with a laugh, in a recent sit-down with The Ringer. "I don't know exactly how to put it. But it was for sure a less-than-50-50 plan." "We were nervous," Harris said in a separate interview, "but we weren't nervous enough to change our overall strategy." Fans were anxious, too. Michael Levin, one of the hosts of the popular Rights to Ricky Sanchez podcast, frequently criticized the Sixers' cap-space gambit, including in a February tweet in which he bemoaned "another confounding trade deadline" and mocked the Sixers' "Bountiful Cap Space" that would ultimately be spent "On A Divorced Man Cave." Philly's signing of George, to a four-year, $212 million contract, easily ranks as the greatest coup of the NBA offseason and puts the Sixers—with the star triad of George, Joel Embiid, and Tyrese Maxey—squarely in the championship mix. But this all could have easily gone much differently, much worse, for the Sixers. George could have re-signed with the Los Angeles Clippers. He could have opted into a one-year deal and been traded elsewhere, possibly to Golden State. The Sixers—who allowed nearly their entire roster to hit free agency to chase George—could have come up empty. The partnership they all celebrated last week was part planning and part happenstance, a mix of bad luck and good fortune, a product of both relationships burned and relationships forged. And at its core was a simple act of faith. "If I hadn't had a tremendous amount of respect and faith in Daryl and Elton and Nick, … I would have been really concerned," Harris said. "But I've seen Daryl operate. … You look at Daryl's history, he's never had a losing season. And a lot of it has been adapting to situations where he has to move quickly to create interesting deals." The irony is that Morey's latest superstar coup was only possible because of a different superstar catastrophe. When James Harden, fuming over a contract dispute, called Morey "a liar" and demanded a trade last summer, it forced the Sixers to make a major, unplanned pivot. Morey had acquired Harden just 18 months earlier, to be Embiid's new tag team partner and a replacement for Ben Simmons. Suddenly it was over, imperiling any hopes of title contention—and perhaps Embiid's faith in the franchise. The Sixers couldn't afford to lose a star without a clear pathway to another star. Complicating matters, Harden wanted to land with just one team, the Clippers, who were offering only role players and picks. So Morey made the best deal he could last October, acquiring players on expiring contracts, clearing tens of millions in cap space for the summer of 2024. If the Sixers couldn't swap Harden for another elite player, they would make room to sign one outright. It all sounds logical but hardly simple. Superstars today change teams via trades (and forced trades) much more often than they do in free agency. It's far more common for teams to fail to sign superstars than land superstars with cap room. And, aside from George, there weren't a lot of top-tier players expected to hit the market in July 2024. "We thought that the best path was a Paul George–type path," Morey said. "The other paths we thought were OK, they just weren't as good. … We also felt like in the scenarios where we don't convince Paul that this is the right team, we felt like we had a plan that was . We probably spent 85 percent of our time on the alternate plan, because that was way more complex." Then consider this: The decision to clear cap room effectively meant allowing 13 of the Sixers' 15 players to become free agents—everyone but Embiid and Maxey—which meant potentially losing 87 percent of the roster. (Maxey would be a restricted free agent, meaning the Sixers were essentially assured of keeping him.) Going all in for George meant risking the loss of every valuable role player, from Tobias Harris to Kelly Oubre Jr. to Nicolas Batum. "It actually made planning super hard and interesting," Morey said. Every discussion with Nurse about personnel in recent months came back to a series of question marks. "Nick was like, 'Well, I want to say we need X, but we sort of need everything.' It's very disconcerting if you're a head coach to just see any big gaps in your roster." Morey had extensive conversations with Harris and co-managing partner David Blitzer to lay out the strategy and separate discussions with Embiid and Maxey to make sure everyone was informed and on board. (They were.) But maybe the toughest conversation, Morey said, was with Maxey last summer, when the Sixers asked him to forego a lucrative contract extension to help preserve cap room. It worked out well—Maxey had a breakout season and ultimately signed a five-year, $204 million deal this month—but it wasn't an easy ask of a rising star. "That was hard," Morey said. "Tyrese gets a lot of credit for coming in with an incredible attitude. He should get a lot of credit for allowing this path." (As Maxey said in his own press conference last week, "I understood what the end goal was.") Maxey's sudden transformation into an All-Star helped keep the Sixers in playoff contention and tamped down the pressure to find an immediate Harden replacement during the season. Embiid, the reigning MVP, was playing at such a dominant level that the Sixers looked like potential contenders even without an immediate Harden replacement. Morey was determined to protect his 2024 cap room, unless a truly impactful player became available. "If good opportunities had come earlier, we would have done them," Morey said. "The ultimate moment to know which path you're going down would be this year's February trade deadline. It wasn't hard, because there really wasn't a really good opportunity that came up in February. But if something had, we would have had to really think through it again." The waiting, of course, was the hardest part. That, and the uncertainty over George's plans. Was he still happy with the Clippers? Was he still committed to costar Kawhi Leonard? Would he take less money to stay, to be close to his family in Southern California? Even in a league ruled by gossip (and/or tampering), certainty in these situations is rare. Teams gather as much intel as they can about their targets, but their scouting departments generally don't include telepaths. "You're reading tea leaves," Harris said. "You're trying to figure out what people's intentions are." When the Clippers signed Leonard to a below-max extension in January, the Sixers wondered whether George would do the same—or whether he'd be offended if the Clippers sought a similar discount. Would the Clippers cave and offer George a better deal than they gave their primary star? "Obviously, that was the biggest question through this whole thing," Harris said of the Clippers-George negotiations. "Over time we came to believe that they were going to go a different direction. But we knew that every step of the way they could change their mind. … Those were the two risks, that the Clippers just re-signed him at the max and/or that he changed his mind ." The Sixers' confidence in their plans varied month to month, sometimes week to week. They drew hope from the Clippers' shaky start last fall, with 10 losses in 18 games. They got fretful when the Clippers went 26-5 over the next two months. "You could argue they looked like the best team, easily, to win the title," Morey said of that stretch. "So we felt like the odds were low." Around that time, Brand came to Morey and needled him about one of Morey's pet catchphrases. "He was sort of joking with me," Morey said. "He was like, 'You talk all the time about optionality, Daryl! How are we feeling about that right now?' And I was like …"—here, Morey paused and chuckled—"... 'Yeah.' It was a little nerve-racking, yeah, for sure." What if Clippers governor Steve Ballmer, the NBA's wealthiest owner, simply gritted his teeth and gave George the max? What if George stayed in L.A.? Leonard had already re-signed, taking another potential star free agent off the board. Pascal Siakam had been traded to Indiana and seemed likely to re-sign there. OG Anunoby, who had been traded to New York, was thought to potentially be available—if a team was willing to pay him the max. Maybe LeBron James would leave the Lakers? Eh, probably not, the Sixers concluded. The next tier of theoretically gettable free agents included players such as Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Klay Thompson, and DeMar DeRozan—valuable role players, but unlikely to vault the Sixers into title contention. (The same could be said for potential trade acquisitions like Brandon Ingram and Zach LaVine.) "We thought that, of the realistic options, there was a big drop after Paul," Morey said. Moreover, signing a combination of second-tier players—possibly above market value—might have closed off future opportunities to land a third star. "We wanted the other scenario to be one where we could be an extremely good team, hopefully even better than last year, but one that can continue to maneuver using our picks and stuff to keep upgrading," Morey said. "But it's unknown how that would have worked." Happily for the Sixers, Morey never had to figure that part out. As George would disclose on his podcast after committing to the Sixers in early July, he did prefer to stay in L.A. But he was indeed offended by the Clippers' below-max offers. He was indeed intrigued by a potential trade to the Warriors. But he was ultimately swayed by the chance to form a superteam with Embiid and Maxey—and, of course, by the Sixers' willingness to give him the most years and the most dollars allowed. "I thought everything just aligned perfectly," George said at his press conference. "Where they're at and where they're trying to go and where I'm trying to get to as well." Once George committed to Philadelphia on July 1, everything else began to fall into place. Oubre and Kyle Lowry, two key rotation players last season, re-signed. Free agents Caleb Martin, Andre Drummond, Eric Gordon, and Reggie Jackson all chose the Sixers, in many cases on below-market deals. Morey said that historically, contending teams tend to land better free agents (sometimes at a discount), "because you get the ring chasers who love the idea of playing with these stars. We have three who are really popular among a lot of the veterans in the league. They're like, 'Hell yeah, I'll be playing with Joel and Paul and Tyrese.'" The Sixers got enough of those "hell yeahs" that their roster today looks like one of the strongest in the league, capable of challenging the defending champion Celtics. It might even be the best Sixers team of the Embiid era, though neither Harris nor Morey wanted to make that declaration just yet. "I think this may be the best team we've had," Harris said, smiling but also hedging slightly. "I'm really pumped about this team, to be honest with you. I probably should tamp this thing down. But I think that we have a really good team." Of course, there are other risks baked into the Sixers' star-heavy strategy. George is 34 and missed a third of all regular-season Clippers games over the past five years because of injuries. Embiid has never played more than 68 games in a season because of his injury history. It's fair to wonder whether the Sixers will stay healthy long enough to live up to the hype. For now, Sixers officials will simply exhale, put away all the contingency plans and spreadsheets, say a prayer to the basketball gods, and momentarily admire their work, having pulled off one of the rarest free agency feats. "It almost was like sort of fate that he happened to come available at the same time that we had room to go sign someone," Morey said. It's surely too soon to declare victory or gloat—anything short of a championship next season will surely be declared a failure—but Morey did allow himself one cheeky clapback. He sent Levin, the Sixers fan and podcast host, a custom-made jersey. Across the shoulders, instead of a player name, it simply reads: "Cap Space."

Behind the Scenes of the Philadelphia 76ers’ Go-for-Broke Summer

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