1 week Ago
PHILADELPHIA — Daryl Morey put it on himself. “We know we’ve let you down,” the Philadelphia 76ers general manager told the fan base Sunday afternoon. His team finished a horrendous season with a 58th loss, as what was left of Philly’s roster fell 122-102 to the Chicago Bulls.
The game didn’t matter. What the Sixers do going forward, after one of the most disappointing campaigns in franchise history, matters a great deal. Advertisement In coming out with coach Nick Nurse for a postgame news conference, Morey officially made it clear that Sixers ownership is bringing him and Nurse back next season after some in-season rumblings that each could be in trouble.
Morey brought back memories of the franchise’s mea culpa after the 1976 season, when the team featuring Julius Erving and George McGinnis failed to deliver the championship most in town thought inevitable after Philadelphia bought Erving’s services from the New York Nets. The Sixers started using the phrase, “We Owe You One,” in commercials promoting the next season. Morey said he made a major mistake in surrounding Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey, who were supposed to provide a championship core to build around, with veteran players coming off the bench.
The thought going into the season was that Philadelphia would need graybeards supporting its star trio. But the vets Philly had on its bench, from Eric Gordon to Kelly Oubre to Andre Drummond, got just as injured as the 76ers’ mainstays, whose All-Star players missed a combined 134 games this season. George only played 41 games with left adductor muscle and knee injuries.
Maxey only played 52 games with a sprained right finger. “Ownership gave us the resources to make aggressive moves this offseason to put a championship roster around Joel and Tyrese,” Morey said. “Sometimes, those aggressive moves don’t initially work out.
But we feel good about those three guys, our three All-Stars, going forward. I have to do a better job of putting a supporting cast around them. “When you go through a season like this, you really need to take a step back, and everyone needs to find a mirror, starting with myself.
What could have gone better? What can I do better? And there’s quite a few things there. ..
. I didn’t put enough emphasis on the team getting through the regular season. Next season, for sure, we will be a younger, more dynamic group.
” Advertisement In going that route, Morey’s notion sounds suspiciously like the “two tracks” approach the Golden State Warriors unsuccessfully tried to keep their championship aspirations flowing, bringing in James Wiseman, Jordan Poole, Moses Moody and Jonathan Kuminga to backfill Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. But of that group, which starts with Golden State drafting Poole in 2019, only Kuminga and Moody are still on the roster, and their minutes are rarely consistent. The Warriors’ renaissance this season came after they acquired 35-year-old Jimmy Butler at the trade deadline.
The 76ers do have some youth in the pipeline already. Guard Jared McCain, the team’s 2024 first-round pick, had the inside track to winning Rookie of the Year honors before going down for the season with a torn left knee meniscus. Rookie center Adem Bona and guard Justin Edwards got big minutes and produced once the frontline players went down.
But Morey believes that two factors require an even younger, longer, more athletic roster. One, the NBA, at last year’s All-Star break, began instructing its referees to stop blowing their whistles so much after complaints that there was too much of a parade to the free-throw line, which both slowed games down and destroyed game flow. Two, teams have changed their play styles during the regular season in the last few years.
For example, more teams are again looking for offensive rebounds, after a trend which saw several teams dramatically de-emphasize crashing the glass to get back defensively quicker to guard against transition 3-pointers. “It’s just a very high-effort regular season,” Morey said. “I do think it’s like a challenge, a real challenge, to both build for the way the league is trending in the regular season, and for the playoffs,” he added.
“But I do think that Golden State’s a good example, too. The playoffs generally come down to, are your great players, or your great player, better than the ones on the other team? That sort of dictates where your first and second and third players have to come from. We feel very good about our ability to find those young talents, like Justin Edwards last year.
And again, Golden State’s a good example. They’ve also done that very well.” But nothing is more important than Embiid returning to the form that made him the 2023 NBA MVP.
He’s only played 58 games over the last two regular seasons and has looked like a shell of himself at times. He only appeared in 19 games this season before being shut down for good in late February. At 31, there is great concern about Embiid’s ability to put together any extended stretch of play going forward.
Advertisement But the 76ers are still planning to build around their franchise player , who underwent arthroscopic surgery on his left knee last week. The team continues to maintain, in consultation with numerous doctors, that Embiid’s knee can hold up going forward. The 76ers do not believe that Embiid has the debilitating “bone on bone” condition in the knee, in which there is no longer enough cartilage available to keep the knee’s bones from rubbing against one another, causing increasingly acute pain.
Morey said that Embiid will spend much of the first part of his rehab following the arthroscopic surgery working directly with Dr. Jonathan L. Glashow, who performed the surgery at NYU Langone Sports Medicine Center.
“We love that after a lot of work, working with over 10 doctors, six in person, that have examined him, and a long process to get to the right answer, we feel great that Dr. Glashow is the right answer, and that the surgery went so well,” Morey said. Yet there is also a hope within the organization that Embiid will take ownership of his disastrous season, which included a suspension for shoving a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist last November, which brought a three-game suspension from the league.
It included a November team meeting in which Maxey, with whom Embiid is close, called Embiid out for being late to practices and other team functions . The 76ers are cautious discussing Embiid’s physical and emotional states, both of which are works in progress. He is fiercely private about both, though he does occasionally reveal how he’s coping.
“I saw Joel as, of course, it takes a toll on him,” Maxey said before Sunday’s game. “Because, this last month, however long it’s been that I’ve been out, I had a conversation with my mom and my dad two days ago. My mom was like, ‘You haven’t really called or talked that much.
’ I’m like, ‘It just sucks. I just don’t feel great now. I don’t have a great feeling.
’ ...
(with Embiid), it’s difficult. Advertisement “It’s really difficult, especially in his shoes, where he wants to be out there, and he wants to play, and the team is struggling, and he knows that he can help. And when he does get out there, he doesn’t feel his best.
It’s hard. It’s very hard.” But Maxey also said that Embiid has been around the team most of the season.
(He wasn’t at Wells Fargo Center for the season finale, though.) “He’s talked,” Maxey said. “He talks to me all the time, helps me all the time.
He helps the team, puts his two cents in. And we appreciate that. At the end of the day, Joel’s a really bright mind, an exceptional basketball player.
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I know he’ll put the work in to get back to the kind of player he wants to be.” George said before the game that he plans to spend time during the offseason with both Embiid and Maxey. The veteran forward came to Philadelphia with a ballyhooed four-year, $210 million deal, but also struggled mightily to find his best form.
“It was just a ton of stuff going on,” George said. “It was a lot for me, I think, from a mental standpoint. A lot of stuff that was just going on that I was kind of trying to balance while being in a new situation.
There was internal stuff for me. There was personal stuff for me. There was the fires that was going on out west, where my home is.
New situation. There was frustration from injuries. “And holding myself accountable (for) not playing to the expectation that I had coming into the season.
So there was just a ton of stuff that was weighing on me, that going into next year, I’ll kind of be free from a lot of those (burdens), and alleviated from a lot of those. And so I do expect a better season. I expect a better turnaround for myself and this team.
” (Top photo: Bill Streicher / Imagn Images).
