You Did It, Daryl!!
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With approximately seven and a half hours left in my birthday week, Adrian Wojnarowski let me know I still had one gift left to open: Contrary to what we'd basically all excepted as an inevitability, James Harden would reportedly NOT be returning to the Sixers -- or rather, he will be returning, but only for long enough to pack the belongings from his cubicle before he's escorted to his next team. Apparently, Harden will be opting into the final year of his current Sixers contract, merely as a semi-formality, to allow him to be moved to a team that would be unable to sign him outright, as a sort of stay-and-trade. Sez Woj: "It’s expected that Harden has played his last game for Philadelphia."
Wasn't expected by me! I'll certainly take it, though: I'd been beating the Harden at No Cost drum since the offseason started, and while I'd also done the work to talk myself into it not being the end of the world that he was almost certainly definitely obviously coming back, I am going to have a much easier time bracing the rest of this offseason knowing Uno will not be returning at the end of it. And you're saying we might get other stuff for him too? Even better!! Send me any and all of your fake trades shipping him to Los Angeles or New York and my response to every one of them will be the same: Sold. I'm not the sort of person who makes Amazon wishlists for holidays or whatever; if you're getting me something, whatever it is, I'm sure it's fine. Touched that you thought to get me anything at all, really.
There's a lot to celebrate here, and I plan to celebrate all of it once whatever the trade ultimately is becomes official. For now, I want to focus on the actual gift-giver here: Daryl Morey, who continues to defy expectations and forge a new path as the Sixers' GM, simply by not explicitly retracing the path he took with the Rockets.
To be fair, you can't really blame us for assuming Daryl would be playing from a fixed setlist this summer. Last year, he traded for James Harden, re-signed Harden on a cheaper-than-expected deal, and then signed both P.J. Tucker and Danuel House, Jr. with the leftover pocket money. All three were, of course, fixtures of the Houston team he had left two years before -- with Harden in particular the Prodigal Point Guard, returning to Morey's warm embrace after a difficult wayward period. It was widely believed Harden was signing a team-friendly deal last summer under the assumption that the Sixers would make up for it with a longer, richer deal this summer, and it was widelier believed that Morey would ultimately be unable to resist doing so -- no matter how much Harden proved in the playoffs that he was not going to be the guy to take the Sixers to the other side of the hump ("a lot," as it turned out).
But hey, maybe it shoulda been more obvious from the Sixers' coaching hire -- Nick Nurse, not Morey's old deputy editor Mike D'Antoni -- that neither recreating his old digs or appeasing Harden were the priority we'd all assumed it would be this offseason. To eschew the guy who both Morey and Harden had the most success with patroling the sidelines -- and who would likely just flip the ball to Harden and say "we'll figure it out from here" -- in favor of a guy who preaches defense, accountability and being red-assed... if it wasn't a direct message to Harden that he was not welcome on the Future Sixers, it was at least pretty transparent about his input not being welcome at the next Board of Governors meeting.
And now, it seems that whatever the numbers that Morey would not go above to bring Harden back was not to his former basketball twin flame's liking. The Athletic's recap of the situation that led to the Morey-Harden relationship's dissolution -- a close second to Olivia Rodrigo's "Vampire" for the most bitterly betrayed-sounding release of last night -- reads like Morey was damn near taunting Harden for his inability to find a better contract offer, even refusing to bargain with him in earnest until the official opening of free agency. (Which, to be fair, does seem at least slightly gaslighty from the guy who certainly lists "tampering" in the first line of the "skills" section on his resumé -- though also to be fair, who even wants to imagine what Dave Silver's penalty would be for a Process Repeat Tamperer?) Regardless, the site now reports that "Morey’s choice to keep Harden and his camp in the dark regarding the Sixers’ plans had everything to do with Harden’s choice to ask out."
I mean... bravo, Daryl. I don't particularly know what to say: Even if I wasn't 100% positive that Harden would return, I was pretty close to 100% that Harden would leaving would not be the result of Morey treating him like an app match he had zero interest in pursuing a third date with. Not that I bear Harden any ill will or take any specific delight in him apparently overestimating the market's interest in him this summer -- I won't even boo him during his eventual return game, he was a good Sixer. But for Daryl to take a look at perhaps the most meaningful long-term relationship of his pro career, and realize that nothing is actually stopping him from just standing up and walking away... I just didn't think he had it in him. I wouldn't even necessarily have blamed him for not having it in him, really.
But now, it feels like anything is once again possible for the Sixers. Which is almost certainly a fallacy, given that our trade return for Harden will likely not be tremendous and that there will almost certainly be no way of adding another player of Harden's caliber as a short-term replacement. But merely not being tied to Harden for the entire foreseeable future... it opens up so many possibilities for this team, both in an on-court and a front-office sense. Now we can really see Daryl run his game, with a coach he actually hired in place, and a whole lot of moving (and moveable) pieces to maneuver with. It's like flipping to a beloved old TV sitcom on cable expecting to see reruns, and finding out there's an entirely new season currently airing that you had no idea existed -- a little scary, and you have no idea how it's gonna end up, but still pretty damn exciting.
And make no mistake: Harden will probably be really good next regular season, and the Sixers will probably struggle some on offense, and there will be plenty of "Miss Me Yet?" Harden bumper stickers to go around online for at least a few months. But there's probably not a Sixers fan alive right now who wouldn't trade some regular-season wins next year for a chance at something new next postseason. As long as Harden was around, we'd know how from the very beginning of the season how the story would ultimately end; without him could very well go even worse, but at least we'll have to wait another 11 or 12 months to find out for sure. Daryl has rewritten his own narrative this summer, and in the process he's given the rest of us space for a couple new chapters as well. Dunno about y'all, but it's the best birthday present I could ask for.