The vibes for the Philadelphia 76ers are at a low point for the season. The team has lost six of their last nine games, Paul George is about halfway through a league drug policy-related suspension, and Joel Embiid is currently missing time with an oblique injury. Losses to Boston and San Antonio this week looked like blowouts going in and played out accordingly. Philadelphia is less than one full game clear in the standings of the Play-In tournament.
At least the team’s 2024 first-round pick is flourishing,
rounding into form after dealing with a couple of injuries coming into the season. Jared McCain has three 20-point games across his last seven appearances, shooting 48.5 percent from the field and 43.1 percent from three since Feb. 6. Of course, that was the date the Sixers traded McCain to Oklahoma City for Houston’s 2026 first-round pick and a few second-rounders. And as much as some people want those covering the team to stop bringing him up and focus on those players still here in Philadelphia, the McCain trade is hanging over everything going wrong with the Sixers right now.
First, the Sixers lost a rotation player and didn’t add one of even a similar caliber. So their ‘glut of guards’ right now is really just Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe getting run into the ground, plus Quentin Grimes. We saw when Grimes missed time recently with an illness, and might again with Edgecombe being ruled out after the fall he took Tuesday night, that everything completely crumbles if any of those guys are unavailable.
McCain leaving has also shined a light on coaching issues with Nick Nurse at the helm. McCain wasn’t given much runway this season in Philadelphia, and we all assumed it was mostly due to struggles coming back from the injuries. Except now, Jared immediately slotted into the rotation for the defending champions, a team with much more guard and wing depth than the Sixers by the way, and is being used in a bunch of creative actions by head coach Mark Daigneault to great effect. Why weren’t sets incorporated in Philly that played to McCain’s strengths, particularly for a team searching for scoring punch off the bench? With how dramatic the shift in his production has ramped up, the “Sixers really screwed the pooch with the McCain trade” narrative has exploded from a local push to a national media blitz with recent articles from Kevin O’Connor, Jake Fischer and Tom Ziller.
Finally, the chemistry for the team has just been completely off since the trade deadline, something that was actually really good during the first half of the season. It’s something that even during his more-lauded days, Daryl Morey would be criticized for: overlooking the human element. Even supposing his calculation of Jared McCain’s trade value was correct (and it’s looking like it very, very much was not), what message does shipping him out and not doing anything else to backfill that rotation spot at the deadline send to the rest of the team? You have your major building block for the future, Tyrese Maxey, talking about how difficult the trade deadline was, and then how he misses Jared.
Maxey is being diplomatic, but it’s not hard to connect the dots that he’s bothered by how management kind of gave up on this season last month. And I think we all know how Joel Embiid feels about things after he publicly implored the front office not to duck the tax prior to the deadline. O’Connor reported that the Sixers made some calls around Kawhi Leonard, but you can’t fracture a team’s chemistry to the degree trading McCain did on a pipe dream. You need to have Plans B, C, and D in place.
So the Jared McCain trade hurt the Sixers’ chances this season and hurt the organization’s standing in the minds of their star players. Early returns look like the ‘sell high’ was anything but, and signs are pointing to a potential coaching change being needed. McCain once looked to be part of the bridge to the next era of Sixers basketball, but now, his departure looks like the death knell of the previous era.
