To the disappointment of Sixers fans, James Harden has been shipped to Brooklyn for a boatload of future draft picks and pick swaps in what turned into a four-team deal:
I am distraught.
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The Sixers wasted a year of Joel Embiid's prime last season with a subpar, ill-fitting roster. That was unacceptable. There is always talk of the future when it comes to the team's duo of Embiid and Ben Simmons, but the future is now for Embiid.
He's 26. He's playing the best basketball of his career and should be the favorite for NBA MVP this season. Pairing him with James Harden, one of the greatest perimeter creators in the history of the sport, wouldn't have just maximized the Sixers' title window. It would've created one that was never truly there.
Embiid is an all-world player on both ends of the court, but without a legitimately elite guard or wing to pair with him, it's all for naught. The 2020-21 Sixers are fun, exciting and miles more entertaining than their 2019-20 predecessors. That doesn't mean that they actually have a legitimate shot at the Larry O'Brien Trophy, though.
The idea that Simmons and Embiid have the ability to win the championship for the next half-dozen years is a facade. Simmons is absurdly talented, yes, but a flawed point forward and not the type of player who can right now make the Sixers a credible threat to play deep into the summer.
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Harden would've altered all of that. I was already smelling the champagne in the air on Broad Street for a post-vaccine parade before I got that push notification.
The Sixers could be the late-'70s Portland Trail Blazers. They had an oft-injured but transcendent big man in Bill Walton. The UCLA megastar and legendary broadcaster had just one season during his prime where he played over 60 games: 1977. Not coincidentally, the Blazers won the championship that year (against the Sixers, of all teams, in Julius Erving's first season in Philly). Walton won the league MVP award the following season, got hurt and was never the same.
Trading a 24-year-old All-Star for a 31-year-old Hall of Famer wasn't "mortgaging the future" or whatever phrase you want to throw out there. Tomorrow is not given.
I don't care if they needed to give up Tyrese Maxey, Matisse Thybulle, etc. The deal had to get done.
You can talk about the possibility of Simmons leading great Sixers squads in the mid-'20s, but I would've taken definitive title chances the next three seasons over that 11 times out of 10. The whole point of the game is to win a championship. The pairing of Embiid and Harden would've given the Sixers their greatest chance at doing so since Moses Malone first came to town.
As we've seen twice in this city over the last 13 years, one ring changes everything. The Sixers, sizing up against a Nets team that should walk to the Finals, are further from doing so now than they were just an hour or two ago.
I wonder what Bradley Beal is up to ...