How Can The Sixers Make A Trade With Barely Any Stuff?
The cupboard isn’t bare, but it’s close.
Adam Aaronson, whose legal name is Sixers Adam (@SixersAdam on Twitter), covers the Sixers for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez. He believes cantaloupe is the best food in existence, and is brought to you by the Official Realtor of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
We’ve already had extensive trade coverage on the site, but it’s all been focused on targets: identifying archetypes of players that the Sixers need and possible names around the league who could fit those bills.
This trade deadline will be a massive challenge to Sixers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey and his front office: how do you improve an excellent team with very few valuable assets to offer other teams?
Let’s evaluate what Morey and the Sixers have at their disposal:
A brief refresher on trade rules
I won’t spend much time on all of the rules regarding trades outlined in the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. In layman’s terms: when a team over the salary cap like the Sixers acquires a player, they must send out an amount of salary close to the amount they are acquiring. For example, if the Sixers acquired a player making $10 million, they could likely send out someone making $8 million or $12 million to make the salaries work, rather than someone making $2 million or $25 million.
Additionally, a team cannot exceed the roster limit of 15 NBA contracts at any point during the season, even if they were immediately going to release a player. The Sixers currently have 14 players on NBA deals, leaving one roster spot open. This means they could hypothetically trade a player in exchange for two players and it would be legal as long as the financial requirements are satisfied. But a team with 15 players already under contract would not be allowed to do this.
(Note: The Stepien Rule will be explained soon.)
Players most likely to be moved
In trade discussions, you often hear the term “salary filler.” What that refers to is a player whose primary purpose within a trade is to make the money balance out on both sides, not the team acquiring them actually valuing their play much.
There are two obvious salary filler players on this Sixers roster whose medium-sized contract situations can help expedite trades for legitimate contributors: Furkan Korkmaz, who makes $5 million this season and will make about $5.3 million next season, and Danuel House Jr., who is making $4.1 million this season and has a player option worth $4.3 million for next season. These two alone put the Sixers in territory in which they can acquire some of the more noteworthy trade pieces on the market -- Phoenix’s Jae Crowder, who makes $10.1 million this season, for example.
Right in between Korkmaz and House Jr. in salary is Matisse Thybulle, who is making around $4.4 million this season in what in his final year before becoming a restricted free agent.
Thybulle’s salary alone can similarly help facilitate a move, but unlike Korkmaz and House Jr., there are likely teams who would value him and consider him to be a genuine asset -- he is an elite perimeter defender despite being in just his fourth NBA season. Between his defensive impact and athleticism, there are surely rebuilding teams who may view him as a potential star role player down the line -- there will always be speculation about how valuable Thybulle would be if he became a more capable three-point shooter. But as we know, that is one large “if.”
Thybulle has been better of late since replacing House Jr. in the permanent rotation, but he has yet to provide the team with any evidence that he will suddenly be a viable playoff contributor after two straight years of being played off the floor by teams who simply ignored his presence on offense entirely.
With Thybulle’s restricted free agency nearing and his playoff status very much in the air, plus the team lacking future draft picks (we’ll get there momentarily), I am of the belief that the Sixers should aim to use Thybulle as a trade asset to help acquire someone who can be trusted in those high leverage situations.
Any combination of these three players put the Sixers in range to find a significant rotation upgrade. But it may take Thybulle’s inclusion to really generate interest -- selling teams will have little interest in Korkmaz and House Jr. outside of their salaries.
Draft picks
Here is why using Thybulle as a trade asset seems especially prudent to me right now: as I briefly mentioned earlier, this team has exhausted their ability to use draft compensation in trades with prior moves. Trading young talent is their easiest path to finding helpful pieces, and outside of Jaden Springer, Thybulle is their only young former first-round pick. A trade involving pending free agent Shake Milton is more likely than you’d think, but would still be a surprise as he has become an essential part of this team’s rotation.
How much have they exhausted their draft capital? Well, they don’t own their 2023 first-round pick after trading it to the Brooklyn Nets last season in the James Harden / Ben Simmons deal (Brooklyn has since redirected the pick to the Utah Jazz). Brooklyn also owns their 2027 first-round pick from that trade. Additionally, the Sixers owe their 2025 first-rounder to the Oklahoma City Thunder through the Al Horford / Danny Green trade.
This is a significant issue because of the Stepien Rule. The rule states that a team cannot be without a first-round in consecutive future drafts. Because of the picks they’ve already sent out, they aren’t eligible to trade a first-round pick that comes before the year 2029. Essentially, you can scrap any trade idea in which the Sixers give up a first-rounder.
That leaves them to second-round picks to supplement on top of young talent and salary filler. However, they don’t own any of their second-rounders until 2027 -- they forfeited their 2023 and 2024 second-round picks as a result of tampering with then-free agent PJ Tucker. Their 2025 second went to OKC in the aforementioned trade. They also traded their 2026 second-rounder -- believe it or not, they gave it up to help finalize the sign-and-trade which sent Jimmy Butler to the Miami Heat and brought Josh Richardson to Philadelphia.
So, what do they have? For now, just a second-rounder this season that they acquired through a series of trades, finishing with a deal during the 2019 NBA Draft that sent the Atlanta Hawks the rights to an early-second round pick that the Sixers didn’t use (Atlanta used the pick to select Bruno Fernando).
Back at the time, I earmarked this pick as one that the team should hold onto in favor of the other second-rounders they owed at the time. This is because they will receive the most favorable of the second-round picks of Atlanta, the Charlotte Hornets and the Cleveland Cavaliers. The odds were always on the side of at least one of those teams having a down year. And, indeed, Charlotte sits with a 12-34 record, third-worst in the NBA. That means if the season ended today, this pick the Sixers own would be the 33rd selection, absolutely a viable alternative for teams who can’t quite extract a late first-round pick from potential contenders.