When the NBA’s latest collective bargaining agreement was put it place, the restrictive nature of both the first and second aprons sent a clear signal to expensive teams willing to exceed either: There will be consequences.
As a result, teams have become less enthused about major payrolls, as they’d have to navigate challenges such as 100% salary matching in trades, no acquisition of players via sign-and-trade, salary aggregation limitations, and a small laundry list of additional items, directly preventing them from upgrading their rosters.
These changes, in many ways, translate into one larger goal: contract efficiency.
Teams that now carry dead money or bad contracts will be at an enormous disadvantage from a competitive perspective.
This should make fans of the Philadelphia 76ers squirm, as the franchise currently finds itself in the worst salary-cap situation of any team in the NBA.
With the recent news of star center Joel Embiid being shut down for the season due to a left knee issue, the Sixers are facing some severe long-term questions in regard to how they should move forward.
In September, the Sixers extended the contract of Embiid by adding three years and $192 million to his existing deal, which is now scheduled to expire in 2029, immediately following a year in which Embiid would have earned over $69 million.
A couple of months prior, the Sixers handed out a max-level contract to former All-Star Paul George in July. That deal came in at $211.5 million, which will run over four seasons, including this one.
Philadelphia, through team president Daryl Morey, inexplicably gave George a player option on the final year of his deal worth $56.5 million, making you wonder who exactly the Sixers were negotiating against for his services.
George, who’ll turn 35 in May, is playing some of the worst basketball of his career and has shown multiple signs of being in harsh decline, which will only make his contract — and the player option — more egregious as time goes on.
This season alone, Embiid and George have combined for over $100.6 million on Philadelphia’s cap sheet.
They’ve scored a combined 1,100 points as we approach the 60-game mark of the season, with George playing 40 games and Embiid 19.
Needless to say, that’s concerning for a multitude of reasons. It not only underscores what a major disappointment this particular season has been, but it signals a potentially rough future, with two aging stars who struggle with health.
Embiid, who has said he might never play back-to-back games again for the rest of his career, turns 31 on March 16. The former MVP can still be effective, but it’s fair to question if he’ll ever return to All-NBA form or if he’ll even be able to play half a season moving forward.
George, who’s looked like a shadow of his former self, could, in theory, have a bounce-back year in 2025-2026, especially if he catches fire from downtown, but it would seem likely that he’ll remain dramatically overpaid for the rest of his contractual years.
Making this whole situation more complicated is the fact the Sixers have an actual in-his-prime star in Tyrese Maxey, who’s also earning a max contract.
Maxey, who signed a five-year deal worth $203.8 million this past offseason, is so far worth his compensation. The 24-year-old is a high-caliber All-Star player who has age on his side, to the point where the Sixers won’t have to worry about his long-term salary level.
The complications arise when you look ahead and ask the uncomfortable question: How can the Sixers properly build around Maxey when they’re dealing with the contracts of Embiid and George?
There isn’t a good answer, especially when taking into consideration that Embiid and George border on being almost impossible to trade, at least with the hope of getting anything of value in return.
Philadelphia might get lucky if an ambitious team is willing to fork over an expiring deal for Embiid in the hope it can squeeze a year or two of MVP-caliber production out of him.
While that seems unlikely, all it takes is one team to think like that, and the Sixers would have an out.
More than likely, teams will ask for compensation to take on Embiid’s contract, just as they would George’s, and that wouldn’t be an unreasonable ask given the severity of the circumstances.
Teams know the Sixers are going nowhere if Embiid is limited and George is going through a drastic decline. It’d be well within their rights to squeeze the Sixers for all they can if they were to take on one of those deals.
Of course, there is one scenario that could help bail out the Sixers, and that’s the draft. But it’s going to take a boatload of luck to get there.
As it stands, the Oklahoma City Thunder own Philadelphia’s first-round pick, which is top-6 protected.
For the Sixers to keep that pick, they’ll obviously have to pick within the top 6, and that means lottery luck because they aren’t bad enough to lock that pick in for themselves. They’d essentially have to enter the area of the Washington Wizards and Charlotte Hornets for a chance to better their odds for that selection, and that appears optimistic.
Should the organization keep its pick through lottery luck, however, and perhaps even get a chance at drafting Duke forward Cooper Flagg, that would reset their whole clock.
Flagg would represent a fresh start, and one where the Sixers can afford to simply wait out George’s contract, which expires in 2028 without that deal overlapping with Flagg’s rookie extension.
Of course, those are long odds, and it’s simply not a viable plan given the likelihood of the Sixers having to fork over their selection to Oklahoma City.
The path unspoken of, for good reason, is taking more drastic and uncomfortable measures.
If the Sixers explore the market for deals focusing on Embiid and George, but come to find no one’s willing to trade for either of them, they could opt to test the market for Maxey and be willing to take on bad money, thus being able to ask for more draft-pick compensation in return.
Numerous teams would have interest in Maxey, and if the Sixers could time the draft-pick acquisitions to land in the late 2020s, when the George and Embiid deals are about to expire, they could enter 2030 armed with incoming draft picks, young players selected up along the way and oodles of cap space to optimize flexibility.
Yes, that plan is five years away. And no, the time in-between won’t be enjoyable. It’s an unnaturally long wait for an NBA team to begin a new era.
But what is the alternative if Embiid continues to break down and George keeps declining? Even if the Sixers can trade both stars as their contracts get shorter, will teams be ready to relinquish expiring contracts for players who are essentially of little to no use as they enter their mid-to-late 30s, with substantial injury patterns?
If this all reads as remarkably bleak, it’s because it is. It would have to take a near miracle for the Sixers to see a turnaround for both Embiid and George to the point where they’ll live up to their compensation level.
In today’s NBA, when a team isn’t getting proper value out of its biggest contracts, it has no chance to become a contender.
That’s the challenge Philadelphia is facing, and the outlook for change is incredibly small.
