The most important things Daryl Morey said about James Harden, Joel Embiid, and the Sixers’ next coach

The NBA offseason is as much about economics and power politics as it is about player evaluation and coaching tactics. In both of those areas, information and leverage are the ultimate currencies. Daryl Morey wasn’t going to give away much of either on Wednesday afternoon.

The Sixers president twice declined to speak in even general terms about the organization’s looming negotiations with James Harden. He went slightly further than that when discussing the team’s search for a new head coach. But only slightly. It won’t be Doc Rivers. It could be someone like him. Or, it could be someone different.

In short, Morey’s third annual we-came-up-short-and-aren’t-happy-about-it press conference didn’t offer the chattering class much to react to. But it did produce some moments that are worthy of a deeper look.

1. Morey referred to re-signing Harden as “Scenario A,” and then followed it up by saying, “Scenario B would be, if he’s not back, we’ll have to get creative and we feel good about the tools available to us if that happens.”

If you really wanted to read deeply between the lines, you could note that Morey used the terms “Scenario A” and “Scenario B” instead of “Plan A” and “Plan B.” There’s less ambivalence baked into second phrasing than the first. A plan is a plan. If it falls through, there’s another plan. Scenarios are simply circumstances that happen that must be reacted to. There’s no preferred choice. Just an either/or.

That said, even if Morey was being intentional, we don’t know why he was being intentional. Maybe the Sixers have already decided they aren’t comfortable giving Harden the full four years and roughly $210 million he is eligible to receive. Maybe they think that however high they are willing to go is still higher than any other team. Maybe they think they are bidding against themselves. Maybe they think they’ll be bidding against someone else. Maybe they are only willing to give him two years and $96 million. Those are all radically different scenarios with different implications on how this thing plays out.

One thing is for sure. Because of the NBA’s salary cap rules, the Sixers really don’t have the option of deciding whether they “want” to move forward with Harden. From a short-term perspective, the money they’d use to re-sign Harden is essentially use-it-or-lose-it. They are allowed to go over the cap to re-sign Harden. If they don’t re-sign Harden, they can’t use that money to re-sign someone else. In a best-case scenario, it might leave them with an extra $10 million or so that they can allocate to a new addition. But barring some convoluted sign-and-trade, Harden almost certainly has to be Plan A.

2. Morey disputed the notion that the team did not progress during Harden’s tenure, saying “I don’t accept that we haven’t advanced. I think we were a better team than last year and the year before that.”

He’s right. As frustrated as fans were with the way Harden and his teammates finished the series, the Sixers were a far better team than in 2021 or 2022. This was the most competitive team that we’ve seen since the Jimmy Butler team that took the Raptors to Game 7 in 2019. This year is a lot like that one. The Celtics are probably the best team in the NBA this season. The Sixers were up 3-2 on them and would have won the series if they didn’t have a historically bad night on wide open looks in Game 6. They were awfully close to playing in an Eastern Conference finals where they would have been favored. Harden was a big part of that. He won them two games on the offensive end. Yes, he is a maddening player. Yes, his body is aging poorly. Yes, the team will be taking a huge risk if they sign him to a four-year deal. But they are still far more likely to be a better team with him than whoever they manage to replace him with. That’s just the economics.

3. Morey downplayed the impact that in-game coaching acumen has on a team’s success. Other qualities he cited in successful head coaches were a winning track record, “working with your star players,” and “recruiting star players.” As for scheme and strategy, he said, “It is an important element, but it tends to get overvalued. . .It can only be one part of the puzzle. It’s just one part of the picture.”

I’ll be honest: I have no idea what Morey is going to be looking for in his next coach. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did not want to get into a situation where he was implicitly throwing Rivers under the bus by listing all of the qualities he wanted his new coach to have. I also agree to an extent that people overvalue the importance of in-game coaching in the NBA. Did Joe Mazzulla really out-coach Rivers, or did he have a team that had been playing the same style of basketball for six years for three different coaches and the one player on the court who couldn’t be stopped in Game 7? Put it this way — a coach who is good at X’s and O’s and bad at all of the other stuff can have a much greater negative impact on a team than a coach with an inverse skill set. In a league where the stars are as important and the egos are as fragile as they are in the NBA, a coach must first and foremost be a guy who the players respect and want to play for.

» READ MORE: The Sixers need a new coach. They should call Dawn Staley.

That being said, the Sixers are at a point where they need to improve at the margins. In-game coaching may not turn a 40-win team into a 50-win team, but it can absolutely turn a playoff loss into a playoff win. And the Sixers have been one or two wins short of the Eastern Conference finals in three straight years under Rivers.

4. The most instructive thing Morey said about the coach search was that Harden and Embiid will not have any “direct input” and that it will likely be a long process, saying “We do not think it will move quickly. . .you want to look for a coach that is a fit with how we want to play and the players we have, but the players won’t have an input.”

The most important dynamic in the coaching search is how the Sixers will weigh Harden and Embiid. Obviously, Embiid will have an impact. He may not be sitting in on the interviews, but he has de facto veto power simply by being him. In a league where trade requests are essentially granted, the team isn’t going to risk alienating the guy who single-handedly makes them a winner.

Harden is the bigger unknown. He, too, has leverage, because he is about to become a free agent. But there’s a chance he and Embiid have conflicting opinions on the style of basketball they want to play.

A key piece of context here is that the Sixers will not have any official clarity on the Harden situation until at least June 30. That’s the the first day that NBA teams are allowed to start negotiating with free agents. If Harden is serious about exploring his options, then he can’t do that explicitly for another month and a half. That raises an obvious question: If the new coach needs to fit with the players, and you aren’t going to know who the players are for another month and a half, how do you hire a new coach before then?

Obviously, neither side is going to be sitting on their hands before then. Unless the NBA has suddenly found a way to prevent things from being done the way they’ve always been done, Harden will have a pretty good idea of potential landing spots outside of Philadelphia. Likewise, the Sixers will have a good idea of what kind of contract it will take to retain Harden. But deadlines exist for a reason. They tend to be necessary to spur action.

It’s going to be an interesting couple of months.

» READ MORE: Sixers’ Daryl Morey: Joel Embiid was ‘shocked’ by Doc Rivers firing