4 Big Picture Thoughts Heading Into the Sixers' Off-Season

MOC faces some unfun truths about the Sixers' summer to come.

The Sixers’ 2024-25 season is finally over. It was a massively disappointing season, as they came into the year with the eighth-best title odds, and will end the year with the fifth-worst record in the league. As they head into an important off-season, here are a few big-picture thoughts that are worth considering as they aim to right the ship.

I’m bracing for a quiet off-season outside of the draft

Heading into last off-season, we couldn’t be sure what exactly would happen, but we felt pretty confident it would be an eventful summer. The Sixers’ combination of max cap space and trade assets meant that they likely would be involved in every rumor and would come away with a dramatically altered roster.

This summer, I’m expecting just about the opposite; I think this roster will look quite similar heading into next season, and as Daryl Morey stated at a press conference on Sunday, both he and Nick Nurse will be back next season.

I know some Sixers fans are angry and are dying for overhaul of any kind, but I really do understand the logic behind keeping the team and the org chart roughly the same heading into next year.

Given Joel Embiid and Paul George’s (varying) lack of trade value, it just doesn’t make sense for a potentially rebuilding team to salary-dump them; there’s a much better case to be made that the Sixers should just pray for better health for those two guys next season, and even if the team once again stinks, they’re better off just eating the contracts rather than paying to get off of them. More on that in a bit.

Regarding Nurse, while I’ve been quite critical of him this season, one of the best arguments against firing him is that we don’t ultimately have any idea what next season’s team will be like, and firing him and making another long term commitment to another coach doesn’t make a whole lot of sense under those circumstances. It’s hard to hire the right coach for the roster when there is simply no way to know what the goal of next year’s team will be.

If, for example, we felt great about Joel Embiid’s health heading into next season, I think hiring Michael Malone – who has experience building an offense around a great center, and is a fiery motivational leader – would be a great idea. But given that it’s more likely that the team is embarking upon some form of a rebuild, hiring a hard-ass veteran coach could easily be a huge mistake.

So, another season with Nurse at the helm while the team figures out its long term path isn’t the worst thing in the world. He has certainly demonstrated that he can be a good coach in the past, and I’m not so thrown off by this year that I could never fathom him doing a better job if the situation around him is less chaotic next year. And, even if we still view Nurse as a bad fit after/during next season, they at least will be able to fire him and replace him with someone who matches up with their short and long term goals – whether that is a team still trying to contend, or a team entering a rebuild.

As for Morey, as insane as his rhetoric drives me, I still am completely fine with giving him at least another year running basketball operations. I trust him to draft well, to win trades on the margins, and find some young diamonds in the rough – which are really the only things the team should or can do this off-season. He’s done a great job with those three specific things over this past year, and I trust him to do so again. If things go south with this team again next year, I expect I’d be more inclined to call for Nurse’s job than Morey’s.

I dunno man, I’m not trying to position myself as cheering for all of this, it’s just hard to know what to feel when the goals of the team itself are so uncertain. For me personally, I’m pretty apathetic towards everything besides keeping the draft pick and hoping Joel Embiid gets healthy. If one or both of those things happen, that’s all I can realistically ask for from this off-season.

Paul George’s terrible play this season was not due to him being “washed”

I’m not sure if this is a scorching-hot take or not, but I really don’t believe that Paul George’s play this season is primarily explained by age-related decline. I blame it mostly on the combination of injuries and him mentally quitting on the season the second that things started to go south – two things that we could have easily seen coming and are certainly damning indictments of him, but that don’t necessarily mean that he is doomed to be this bad moving forward.

At the start of this season, George struggled immensely on offense, failing to find any sort of consistency with his jump shot. But his defense was excellent – through December, the team’s defensive rating with George on the court was elite. Even as his shots wouldn’t fall, the overall impact on winning was still there. Heading into January, the Sixers were 11-9 with him, and 2-8 without him.

But in January, everything flipped – George found his offensive rhythm, averaging 20.5 points per game on good efficiency, but saw an obvious decline in his impact on the defensive end. The Sixers were one of the very worst defensive teams in the NBA in the month of January – 28th in defensive rating in that stretch – and they went just 3-7 in the 10 games George played. And, notably, it just felt like there was a real lack of overall impact from George. The scoring felt like empty calories, and his defensive impact dropped off a cliff from the month prior.

George then suffered his finger injury on January 25th, and the 11 games that he played after that were an abject disaster. He was a complete non-presence on both ends, looked mentally disengaged, and his shooting woes only got worse.

I’m not saying any of this to put rose colored glasses on his season – he was inarguably bad. My expectations were low, and he was still a massive disappointment. But I guess my concern is that trading George would result in an Al Horford-like outcome. They’d trade him for nothing – or perhaps even attach a pick, which in Horford’s case has come back to bite us – and send him to a better situation, where he’d be healthier and mentally reinvigorated and have a bounce back season. And then, any time any of us mention that he stunk when he was on the Sixers, we’d get the same incredulous response from opposing fans who didn’t watch a single minute of it – “you really expect me to believe that he was bad on the Sixers despite being awesome everywhere else before and after?”

Yes, I do. He was bad. It was a bad season. But I’m not at all of the mindset that he couldn’t be any better next year. I don’t see a guy who can’t move anymore, I see a guy who is a total frontrunner who folded under difficult circumstances this year. That’s a terrible flaw in who he is, but it doesn’t mean that he won’t be better under better circumstances – here or elsewhere – next season. There’s a ton of low-hanging fruit for George to improve next season; if he just hits open 3s at the rate that he historically has, and doesn’t spend 25 percent of his season looking like he doesn’t give a shit, he’ll be better by default.

Well At Least We're Crushing the Tanking Part of the Season

The Sixers may be best off trading back if their pick lands 2-6

I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to draft Cooper Flagg for anything but a top-5 player in the NBA, but I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that the Sixers should entertain trading back in the draft if their pick lands anywhere from 2-6. This is both because of the fact that this range of the draft is littered with guard talent – which the Sixers already have plenty of – and because the Sixers are relatively low on draft capital moving forward. If they retain this year’s pick, they will owe next year’s first rounder to OKC (top-4 protected), as well as their 2027 first to Brooklyn (top-8 protected).

If the pick lands at No. 2, could they get a team like Orlando – with a good young core, but desperate for a lead guard – to give a Godfather offer to trade up and draft Dylan Harper? Would they give up the 16th and 22nd picks in this year’s draft, as well as two more future firsts?

If the pick lands at three or four, could they find a team in the late lottery enamored with Ace Bailey or V.J. Edgecombe that’s willing to trade their current pick as well as a future first in order to snag one of those guys?

The later parts of the lottery feature much more frontcourt talent than the 2-6 range – Asa Newell, Derik Queen and Collin Murray-Boyles are all currently mocked in the 9-14 range. Personally, I’m a huge Derik Queen guy and I would be thrilled to trade back from the 3-6 range to draft him. If a good enough offer comes along to trade back and draft one of those guys, the Sixers should at least be open to it.

Tyrese Maxey needs to take on a different offensive approach next season

As much as we all love Maxey, it’s hard to deny that this season was a real red flag for his prospects of ever being a true No. 1 option on a good team. Maxey struggled right from the beginning of the season to carry the load of the offense without Joel Embiid, and aside from a brief stretch in the middle of January, never truly found a rhythm in his (admittedly unexpected) new role.

It really boils down to two things: 1) Maxey’s limitations as a playmaker, and 2) the fact that so much of Maxey’s value is as an off-ball player.

Regarding the former, it should trouble all of us that his assist numbers went down a hair this season, while his turnovers skyrocketed. Perhaps the increase in turnovers was inevitable, but the fact that his assists went down with his increased responsibility is alarming. On the season, lineups with Maxey and without Embiid had an offensive rating of 112.1. Lineups with both players off had an offensive rating of 110. That is simply not enough of an impact for someone we all think of as an All-Star level player.

But while Maxey’s value as a floor-raiser offensively is pretty limited, the reason that he’s still so valuable is that his impact as a second or third option is elite. He is one of the best off-ball players in the NBA – he can create offense simply by existing. Go back and watch his highlights from Game 5 against the Knicks, and watch how many of his points come from simply playing catch with Embiid off of post-ups. His combination of catch-and-shoot prowess plus his quickness and elusiveness off the dribble make him impossible to help off of. He just needs an offensive hub to orbit around.

His forced progression into more on-ball reps have caused his true shooting percentage to plummet from 60 percent two years ago, to 56 percent this season, despite obviously having improved as a player since then. Next year, if Embiid can’t stay on the court, Nurse will have to engineer more ways to maximize Maxey’s impact off the ball. It is absolutely necessary in order to get the most value out of him.

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Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health.