Let's Wait Awhile: Holding Off on a James Harden Trade Makes Sense For Both Sides
Hold on there, buddy.
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For one reason or another, I almost always end up against blockbuster trade ideas for the 76ers. Sometimes, if you kinda blindside me with a makes-sense-on-paper megadeal that I never saw coming -- Dario and RoCo for Jimmy Butler being the most obvious example -- I can make peace with it pretty quickly. But did I want to trade Markelle Fultz for Kawhi Leonard in 2018 (even though such a deal was probably never really on the table in the first place)? Nah. Am I still furious that we included Landry Shamet in the Tobias Harris trade? Of course. Was I one of the people pushing for the team to trade picks, prospects and half of Penn's Landing for Chris Paul this offseason? Too rich for my blood for a 35-year-old Shake Milton backup.
Unsurprisingly, I'd also rather hold onto Ben Simmons than trade him for James Harden. Partly because I fell head over Nike Blazers for Simmons last season, partly because I want to see if Daryl and Doc can solve this puzzle-wrapped-enigma roster without taking obvious major shortcuts, partly because I care about liking my basketball team as much as I care about winning. (I don't dislike Harden as a casual observer, but I'm not exactly sure I'm ready for the full immersive experience there.) Call it loser mentality and you're probably not totally wrong, but I'd still take the rocky road this Sixers have been over the past few seasons over most easier detours. It may or may not build character, but it certainly builds attachment.
That said, Daryl Morey should still probably trade Ben Simmons for James Harden. I just want him to wait to do so.
For all my affection for Simmons and our other young guys, I recognize why Harden is worth the price tag. As many "well, but this year..." caveats as we can throw out there, the duo of Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons has not simply proven to be championship-caliber on its own. Maybe they both take a leap this year, but we can only say that so many years in a row before it starts to sound like the DeRozan/Lowry-era Raptors convincing themselves that this year was the year they were finally gonna take down LeBron in the East. Eventually, your guys are what they are, and if you want to make a huge step forward as a franchise, you have to go out and get Kawhi Leonard. Harden is a top 5 player, an automatic playoff berth and a perennial top 5 MVP candidate. Harden and Embiid makes a kind of intuitive sense that Simmons and Embiid never has, and very likely never will. James Harden does the things that the Sixers most need at a level no player for them since at least Iverson has even approached. He is a player that you do unbelievably painful things to acquire.
Does that mean you include anything within the franchise's purview with a name that doesn't rhyme with "hotel phlegm greed" in order to get him? Well maybe, but not definitely. This is where I break from the growing faction on Sixers Twitter that seems to believe that sending Simmons, picks and prospects to the Rockets for Harden is not only the tough-but-smart move, but a headsmackingly obvious choice that you'd have to be dense to deliberate. There is obvious risk to dealing a king's (or at least an Anthony Davis') ransom for a player on the wrong side of 30 who commandeers the entirety of an offense and has a history of both clashing with teammates and coming up short in the playoffs. There's counters to these criticisms, too: Namely that the Sixers' offense could use some commandeering, our locker room wasn't exactly the set of Parks & Rec last year, and Harden still has more trips to the conference finals than everyone left on this team from last year combined. But just to say: This isn't a LeBron situation where sentimentality is pretty literally the only argument going out and getting him.
Which is why I say if we're going to get him, let's at least try to do it on our terms -- and to me, that means waiting. After three straight bad-taste-leaving playoff exits, time might not exactly be on the Sixers' side, but it is still mostly on Daryl Morey's. Pre-Morey, the Rockets could laugh at any Sixers GM fronting like they were all good with where the team was a franchise, but Daryl's already made his big splash since coming over, creating a more logical team out of our lumpy roster batter, and now he can credibly present a genuine desire to see what he has with his new squad before pulling the trigger on any Harden deal. Maybe he actually means it and maybe he doesn't, but it's a kind of narrative leverage that he can spin into not actually being that desperate for the player he basically called his rock and his redeemer upon leaving Houston. It means he doesn't have to offer everything right away just to get in the conversation.
That's not to say that he can go in and immediately start dictating terms of engagement to his old club, either. As Spike has said from the beginning of the Harden trade rumors, simply having the best player is the most important leverage -- and Harden is still that, with two years left on his deal and a near-iron man's reputation of durability and consistency. No one's going to be fleecing Houston, and however hard you try to Vincent Adultman together packages for Harden built around Tobias Harris rather than Simmons, none of 'em are even gonna get past the front desk.
But we do have Simmons, and that's enough to buy us time -- maybe as much time as we need. None of the other still-few teams that Harden has reportedly OK'ed as a potential destination has a chip quite like the Fresh Prince: Khris Middleton doesn't have a ton of upside left, Caris LeVert is too old and injury prone, and Tyler Herro is too young and unproven. (Not that Herro didn't show a ton in last season's playoffs -- more than Simmons ever has, certainly -- but that's a lot of faith to put in one playoff run, and Miami's shown no willingness to include him in trade talks anyway.) Simmons is the only one who can immediately anchor a rebuild, who's already at an All-Star level and who has the raw talent to still potentially become much more. The Rockets may have the best player, but the Sixers have the best prospect, and that means we're worth waiting for.
Waiting for what, exactly? Well, I'm with Bryan Toporek, who suggested on Twitter earlier this week what a ot of other smart NBA folks have alluded to of late -- that Morey would do Simmons-for-Harden more or less straight up, but that the Rockets are holding out for both Simmons and an embarrassment of future assets (like the Pelicans acquired from Milwaukee for Jrue Holiday), and Morey has thusfar said thanks but no thanks. In that case, it would now be basically a blinking contest between Morey and his old club to see who will compromise more on their side, one that could last well into 2021 before either side starts to really get dry-eyed.
Both the Sixers and the Rockets are right to hold fast. The Rockets only get to trade Harden once, and they know he's not going to depreciate any over the course of the season -- he may become less valuable to the Rockets themselves as he continues to publicly embarrass the franchise (while engaging with the actual team very strictly on his own schedule), but countless opposing GMs will still move heaven and earth for him regardless. And the Sixers know that until another credible buyer enters the bidding, there's no real risk in playing hardball with Houston to get them to accept the least-painful outgoing return we can realistically present them. Failing that, or any sort of catastrophic injury on either side, nothing major in the math of this overall equation is really likely to change until at least the late-March trade deadline.
So then, it just becomes a question of what regular-season situation is more likely to tip the balances one way or the other. Will the Rockets be able to plausibly claim either another attractive suitor for Harden (or, less realistically, the prospect of a future with Harden brought back into the fold)? Or will the Sixers overachieve in the regular season, gel around an improved Embiid and Simmons, and suddenly not be in such obvious need for a superstar guard to make sense out of their team?
I would bet that Morey, who has publicly stated that he believes the Sixers are being undervalued as a regular-season team, is banking on (or at least hoping for) the latter. If the newly spread-out Sixers -- who lest we forget, are being molded most closely in the image of the 2017-18 post-deadline Ballers who absolutely blitzed the rest of the league -- jump out to a 16-4, 23-7-type start to the season, it might not matter so much that we're likely to still run into the same issues in the playoffs that have submarined us against Boston and Toronto. At that point, we can at least make a reasonable claim to being OK walking away with what we have, and not wanting to ruin our first genuinely good vibes since Game of Thrones was still universally beloved. And at that point, maybe we could convince Houston to accept the deal that gets them Simmons, but not every other positive-value asset we have at our disposal.
You could wonder why it's even worth haggling over future draft picks and potentially non-championship-caliber players like Shake Milton or Matisse Thybulle when it comes to securing a generational offensive talent like Harden. Again, fair -- except that Harden doesn't guarantee you a title or even necessarily a shot at it, and teams that make caution-to-the-wind type deals for players like that usually don't end up in such good shape for it (unless they already have LeBron on their team). Even with Harden and Embiid in tow, the Sixers would still have serious filling in to do around them -- and potentially not all that much time to do it, given Embiid's injury history and Harden's advancing years -- and that becomes significantly harder to do if you include everything else you have to pair the two of them. The Knicks had close to nothing left to build with once they sent Denver all their attractive assets just to couple Carmelo Anthony with Amar'e Stoudemire, and they never even ended up reaching the conference finals. Hopefully Embiid and Harden would work better than that, but this stuff all still matters.
Does it matter enough to risk losing a chance at a top five player -- maybe the best and possibly the last such opportunity we'll reasonably get? Right-thinking people could differ on that one, but I'd say it does. Moreover, I thought the whole point of having a GM like Daryl Morey was that you don't have to content yourself with your team getting milked every which way just so it can get the thing it wants, but that you can actually try to outright win a trade every now and then. If we're going to deal Ben Simmons, it wouldn't be getting James Harden in return that would get me the most excited -- it'd be pulling off a blockbuster trade for once that leaves the other guy grumbling a little. That's the Process that I came of age with a Sixers fan, and for better of worse, returning to it would mean as much to me as any legitimate championship contention ever could.