With a humiliating salary dump trade of KJ Martin, Sixers are cutting costs ... and who knows what else
This wasn't what Daryl Morey was brought to Philadelphia to do.
That’s it. They may have finally done it. All of us are witnesses. After a half-season full of waypoints at ever-increasing altitudes, the Sixers will struggle to reach much higher. Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated until the clown car has come to a full and complete stop. We have arrived at Peak 2025 Sixers.
Daryl Morey’s decision to trade 24-year-old wing KJ Martin is a humiliating move for the team president himself and for the fans to whom he sold this bill of goods of a season. There isn’t a better encapsulation of Morey’s no good, very bad year than the brief and wondrous life of Martin as an alleged Sixers trade asset.
When the team president signed Martin to a two-year, $16 million contract over the summer, the move was heralded as Morey at his most galaxy-brained. Nobody thought Martin was worth $8 million per year — half of it guaranteed — but that was the genius of it. Because the Sixers had his Bird rights, and were thus allowed by NBA rules to exceed the salary cap to re-sign him, they essentially were writing themselves a free money voucher they could cash in later in a trade for a player of equal or greater salary.
Remember, NBA executives are as much central bankers as they are talent evaluators, and Morey knows how to make the cash machine go brrrrr better than most. Which is why the trade of Martin seems like such a repudiation.
It kind of worked out the way it was supposed to, I guess. The Sixers attached a couple of second-round draft picks to Martin’s contract to convince the Pistons to take it off their hands. Except instead of getting a player in return who would upgrade their rotation for the stretch run, Morey and the Sixers got nothing. They sent Martin and picks to the Pistons. The Pistons sent nothing to the Sixers except the sweet satisfaction of avoiding the luxury tax. All of this, according to the Inquirer’s Keith Pompey.
The decision itself probably isn’t worth a federal case. While Martin is a fun player who has shown some improvements as a shooter and finisher, he has been sidelined since Dec. 23 with a foot injury and had a nonguaranteed salary for next season. He is a fringe rotation player on a team that has plenty of more pressing concerns. The decision to trade him likely won’t be the thing that costs the Sixers a title, now or in the future.
But the optics sure aren’t good. While the Sixers didn’t exactly walk away with nothing for their troubles — the deal leaves them with an $8 million trade exception they can use at some point within the next year to add salary without shedding any — the move purely is a cost-cutting one.
Combined with their trade of Caleb Martin to the Mavericks on Tuesday, the Sixers could stand to gain nearly $40 million between their savings on salaries and luxury tax payments and their receipt of a league distribution doled out to non-tax-paying teams. After a summer in which Morey was given carte blanche to maximize his payroll while remaking his roster, it sure looks like Josh Harris and the ownership group have wrestled away the wheel of the ol’ ice cream truck.
The big question is whether the Sixers’ shift into cost-cutting mode signals anything about Morey’s future at the helm of the franchise. Bill Simmons recently floated the prospect of former Golden State Warriors general manager Bob Myers replacing Morey, the podcast impresario saying he has heard “buzz” about the possibility.
In Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain, the Sixers have a couple of young backcourt building blocks who can chuck it with the best of them. It would make some sense if the Sixers started looking for an executive with a track record of organic roster-building rather than continuing the financialized star-chasing that has been Morey’s hallmark as an executive.
» READ MORE: Caleb Martin was traded to Dallas — and he didn’t even have to leave the building
On the flip side, Morey is the one who drafted Maxey and McCain. He also is the one who signed Guerschon Yabusele and Kelly Oubre Jr. to bargain-rate contracts and then watched them blossom into legitimate assets. The irony of the Sixers season is that, in a lot of ways, it was a successful culmination of what Morey set out to do when he took the helm of an underachieving team that included Al Horford and Ben Simmons in 2020. For years, the team struggled to build a deep and complementary supporting cast around Joel Embiid. Morey largely succeeded in doing it this year. His two stars have been the problem.
Between now and the Thursday arrival of the trade deadline, we may get a clearer picture of who is making the calls and what the team’s mandate is.