As NBA free agency begins Sunday, the 76ers will be at the center of everything. This is what happens when only a handful of your players are under contract for next season – and, relatedly, when you lead the NBA in practical salary margin to get through this off-season.
Some movements are obvious to Daryl Morey and his front office: restricted free agent Tyrese Maxey come back on a maximum agreement once all other movements are completed, a formality pending simply because of the The intricacies of NBA salary cap rules. But beyond that, there’s a whole universe of possibilities involving returning players from the 2023-24 roster and new names on the free agent market.
With that in mind, let’s take a look back at how the Sixers have performed in each of these areas recently.
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On my Substack last weekI took the free agency data from Spotrac — an indispensable resource for NBA offseason information — and calculated the the capital gain for each contract awarded from 2011 to 2023, based on the estimated number of RAPTOR wins above replacement the player generated relative to what we expected the salary cap space the player would occupy. We can then add that up by team to see which teams made the smartest free agent moves over that span — including extensions to retain players and deals to bring in new faces.
You can find the complete list, divided by players and teams, here. But for now, we’re looking at the Sixers and their record. Let’s start with the good part: They’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of extending their own free agents over the years. From the summer of 2011 to last year, Philly has 19 players re-signed who had an expected value of 82.0 WAR based on their share of the salary cap. This group collectively produced 92.9 WAR over the life of those contracts, so the Sixers earned 10.9 wins in surplus value, which ranked seventh among all NBA teams this offseason.
The group’s biggest gainer was Thaddeus Young, a perpetually underrated all-around player whose 2011 contract extension took up just 15.2 percent of the salary cap per season on average, but allowed him to generate 29.2 WAR, 13.1 more than would be expected for his salary cap hit. (It’s worth noting that Young was exchanged to Minnesota in the middle of the trade, but this methodology gives the Sixers credit for his value throughout the contract, since they were the ones who originally signed him.)
Other notable offers included James HardenThe 2022 contract extension — no, Harden’s relationship with the Sixers didn’t end well, but he still provided 4.1 more wins than expected — Furkan Korkmaz’s two-year deal from 2019 (2.3 WAR per year while earning just 1.6% of the cap), JJ Redick’s one-year deal in 2018 (5.6 WAR on 12.0% of the cap that year), and Paul Reed’s current deal (2.5 WAR while earning 5.9% of the cap last season).
Not all re-signings have gone so well. Tobias Harris The Sixers have won 1.5 fewer than expected over the last five seasons, thanks to their 33% salary cap percentage. Spencer Hawes’ 2012 contract ranks right next to Harris’, and Danny Green and Lavoy Allen’s contracts are even worse. But the Sixers have mostly avoided big mistakes in overtime play, which has helped them earn a solid ranking.
However, they had less success when it came to signing free-agent players from other teams. They’ve signed 48 players this way since 2011, the fifth-most players of any team, but those players generated 20.5 WAR versus an expectation of 46.2 based on the cap space they occupied. That 25.8 win deficit is the third-worst in the NBA over the 13-year period we looked at, ahead of only the Sacramento Kings and the Orlando Magic (whose WAR surplus of -47.8 is an exception). shocking in itself):
Some Sixer contracts have generated good returns on investment. For example, one-year fliers on Andre Drummond — who was dealt to Brooklyn in Harden-Ben Simmons trade – And Kelly Oubre Jr. generated excess values of 2.7 wins each, ranking among the team’s best value trades since 2011. And Redick’s first deal from the Clippers to the Sixers was worth 1.7 excess WAR.
But most of the Sixers’ outside hires generated less than we expected.
Of the 13 free agents signed since 2011 who brought in at least 2.4% of the salary cap per season, 12 of them (all except Redick in 2017) generated negative capital gain – from Amir Johnson and Nick Young to Kwame Brown and Gerald Henderson. The worst among these transfers? Al Horford, who was technically still under contract with the Sixers until last season, generated 3.8 less WAR than expected based on his annual salary cap share of 25%. And while PJ Tucker and Jerryd Bayless won less relative to the cap – about 9% each – they are together worth about 10 fewer wins than expected during their contracts in Philadelphia.
Of course, the Sixers also haven’t tried all that much to sign free agents from other teams over the years. Maybe it’s because they spent so many years of the era captured by our data mired in “The Process,” avoiding high-priced players in general, but Philadelphia only signed three free agents external for contracts worth 10% or more of the salary cap per season. (The average team in that span has done it 4.4 times, and the Knicks have done it a league-high 11 times.)
Will this change this year? We still don’t know how things will evolve in Morey looking for another star to partner Maxey and Joel Embiid. But if the Sixers are looking to make a splash with a newly signed free agent, they’ll have to overcome the team’s negative record in that area over the past 13 years.
Central match day
The 76ers are preparing for a crucial free agency period that begins Sunday at 6 p.m. With salary cap space widely available, the Sixers are in position to make significant moves to bolster their roster around the All-Stars Joel Embiid And Tyrese Maxey. Join Inquirer to beat the journalists Gina Mizell And Keith Pompeyas they recap the flurry of initial signings for the Sixers and across the league at noon Monday.
