You can’t count on a magical trip to the dentist every year.
While it may have been a bit of a surprise to see the Sixers bring Eric Gordon, who’ll turn 37 on Christmas, back for the upcoming season, they really didn’t have much of a choice. Gordon’s player option for the 2025-26 season made him bound to return to the team in some form. The team convinced him to rip up that option and sign a new deal that both gave him a raise and the team a cut to their salary cap.
Like so many members of last year’s
team, Gordon will be returning trying to erase a bizarre, injury-riddled season. Brought in as a sharpshooter to space the floor, his tenure as a Sixer could not have gotten off to a worse start. He couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn for the first two months of the season, shooting 27.5% from three-point range. That was a problem given that 62% of his shots come from behind the arc these days, according to Cleaning the Glass.
Then something weird happened. Gordon took some time off in December to get an oral surgery — he had to had his wisdom teeth removed. That ended up costing him more time than expected, 12 days in total, but he returned looking like a totally different player. He would go on to hit 48.8% of his threes after his return, taking 4.3 of them a game. That stretch would only last 20 games though. Gordon suffered a wrist injury in mid-February when the wheels really started to fall off. He opted for surgery and did not appear as the team would spend the rest of the season trying to lose any many games as possible.
The temperature on Gordon in this city is still fairly low despite that hot stretch. A big part of that is he wasn’t helpful to the team at the beginning of last season, the only point there was any room for hope. Even with the evidence that he did not completely fall off as a shooter, his re-signing was not super popular among the fanbase.
The additions to the backcourt also factor into this. Gordon’s season basically ended before the emergence of Quentin Grimes late last year. On top of Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain, who look like future building blocks for this team, they also drafted another guard with the third overall pick in VJ Edgecombe. While all of those moves fit in with the shift towards youth that Daryl Morey has talked about all offseason, it’s hard to see how a 17-year veteran with an increasingly repetitive skillset fits into that.
In an ideal world, Gordon has a fairly reduced role this season as those four youngsters eat up the bulk of guard minutes. Provided he doesn’t go a two-month prolonged cold stretch like last season, he could be handy to come off the bench here and there and knock down some shots. That should be easier for him to do as opposed to the necessary floor spacer who was needed to start 13 games last season, including opening night.
The combination of that, plus some good old veteran leadership is a totally acceptable use of an end-of-bench roster spot. Gordon should be fit for the task as he has a decent amount of history with Edgecombe. They’re familiar with each other after playing for the Bahamian national team last summer. Edgecombe has talked extensively about what he’s been able to learn from a veteran like Gordon, as well as poking fun at the fact that they’re now teammates despite a large age gap.
There’s not necessarily anything wrong with using a roster spot for a guy to just be around the young guys, except that the Sixers are using two of them. Not only did they bring back Gordon, but they brought back Kyle Lowry as well, a guy who is such an extreme twilight of his career that a literal coach’s tag was slapped on him during one of the many games he missed due to injury.
While Gordon almost certainly still has more to give on the court than Lowry, neither of them playing solves the issue that this will be a very small roster going into this season. At 6-foot-3, he certainly can’t help any lineups with the young guards together make any sense. That’s not to say he’s completely washed. If a guy can make half of his three-pointers for over a month, he should be getting minutes somewhere. If the Sixers really are pivoting to their younger core, is Philadelphia the place for him?
