PHILADELPHIA — Everything you wanted to know about the James Harden situation but were too afraid to ask …
So, wait, this whole time the Sixers had the option of trading Harden? I thought the Sixers were begging him to re-sign.
I’m not sure “begging” is the correct word. In fact, the Sixers’ messaging was restrained all offseason whenever the Harden topic arose. Perhaps they suspected the die had already been cast. Whatever the case, their posture was that of a team that wanted him back on their terms. They knew they were better with him, but not so much that they were willing to let him set the terms. The dynamic was never clearer than during the hiring process for new head coach Nick Nurse, when Joel Embiid met with the veteran coach and Harden did not.
So this is a good thing?
Not necessarily. It could turn out to be the least worst outcome. Everyone knew Harden was an imperfect fit and a huge risk moving forward. The problem was that the Sixers had no way of replacing him.
Yeah, about that. Everyone says it. But what does it really mean? Why not just save his money and use it elsewhere?
Because the NBA salary cap doesn’t work that way. In simplest terms, teams don’t need salary-cap room to re-sign their own players (in most cases). They do need cap room to sign other teams’ players. The Sixers would be over the cap even if Harden opted out. So they could pay him up to $40-ish million, but they couldn’t pay anybody else that money (at least, nobody who was on another team’s roster at the end of last season). Essentially, it was use it or lose it.
Except, turns out, it wasn’t. Right?
Sort of. Nobody expected Harden to opt in. In hindsight, maybe they should have. There were very few teams on which Harden would even make sense, and none of those teams had any cap space to sign him. That’s not always a deal-breaker, as we’ll see later. But the options were limited, which is probably why we got that weird Christmas Day report about Harden potentially wanting to go back to Houston.
The Suns would have made some sense. The Clippers would have made some sense. The Timberwolves would have made some sense. The Lakers would have made some sense. You could talk yourself into the Spurs. Otherwise, there simply weren’t many situations where Harden would have been an ideal fit. And those are just the teams that had any remote need for him, let alone teams that actually had the means and he had the desire to play for.
That said, everyone figured that the lack of a market would simply mean Harden and the Sixers coming together on a deal somewhere between the short-term deal he signed last offseason and the long-term max contract he wanted.
So, why’d he opt in?
We don’t have that information, but it’s pretty clear that he didn’t want to be here, which makes some sense given how uncomfortable he and Embiid seemed to be at times on the court. I don’t think it was anything personal. But Embiid is a unique player and can be difficult to mesh with on the offensive end. Harden, for all his flaws and weirdness, is an extremely bright, intuitive, natural player. Embiid has only been playing the game since he was 15. Teammates aren’t immune from the rough edges everyone on the outside sees.
That doesn’t really explain why he opted in, does it? I mean, he didn’t want to be here, but he opted in.
Fair. And, yeah, we’ll have to wait and see what happens. I think the other thing we can say for sure is that the free-agent market didn’t have the kind of offer that made it worth him committing for multiple years. There may not even have been an offer at $35 million for one year. So, Harden took his money and requested a trade.
So, problem solved then, right?
Well, not really. Look, the Sixers would almost certainly have more potential with Harden than without him. You’ll see that whenever they trade him and you look at the return. For all his flaws, he was arguably the best pure point guard in the league last season, with the added bonus of having the ability to go off for 40-plus on a random night. The problem is the Sixers needed him to go off for 40-plus every game in order to beat the Celtics. He just isn’t capable of that anymore. As a point guard, though, in the right situation and with the right mindset, he can do things that nobody else out there can.
There is nobody else available out there who can come close to doing that. It’s just the reality of the market. The whole reason Harden was here to begin with was the Sixers’ difficulty in finding a player who could single-handedly push them over the top. Prior to him, they had Shake Milton and Furkan Korkmaz starting games. Josh Richardson. Al Horford. There ain’t a lot of options out there.
So what kind of deal can they expect in return?
The first thing you need to know is that this will be more an exchange of contracts than of players. Remember the salary-cap rule from earlier. The rule of thumb in the NBA is that you can make trades as long as the trades don’t significantly increase your payroll. Specifically, any team (for the most part) that acquires Harden’s $35 million salary will have to part with about $26 million of salary that is already on its books (75% of $35 million).
So, for instance, the Clippers could trade away someone like Norman Powell ($18 million) and Marcus Morris ($17 million). The Sixers could take both of them, in which case it wouldn’t really help them financially and they’d just be banking on those two players helping them. Or L.A. could need to find a third team to take someone like Morris. In which case the Sixers would be netting $17 million in salary, which would probably put them in position to take advantage of the mid-level exception, which allows them to sign a guy for about $12.5 million a year. That’s what they used to sign PJ Tucker last year.
It’s almost self-evident that anybody they acquire isn’t going to come close to equaling Harden. That’s the whole reason another contender will be trading for him.
The one exception is if the Sixers can work a sign-and-trade in which they’d trade Harden for enough salary that they can then trade to another team who serves as a free-agent surrogate, signing a player the Sixers want in exchange for salary. That would presumably be the scenario when they speculate about Kyrie Irving as a possibility. But it could also be a player who doesn’t require nearly as much salary.
For example?
The most likely positive outcome is an offseason that is some combination of 2019 and 2020, when the Sixers acquired Richardson in the Jimmy Butler trade, Danny Green in the Horford trade, and then Seth Curry in exchange for Richardson.
So they are back where they started?
Yep. But with no Ben Simmons!
