The key to the James Harden trade isn’t who the Sixers got. It’s who they already had: Tyrese Maxey.

Maxey has shown that he can be the superstar to pair alongside Joel Embiid. This trade frees him to be the player he can be, the player the Sixers need him to be.

With their trade early Tuesday morning of James Harden (right), the Sixers have freed Tyrese Maxey to develop into their second star alongside Joel Embiid.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

by Mike Sielski | Columnist

Published Oct. 31, 2023, 8:18 a.m. ET

The key to any trade that the 76ers made to get James Harden out of here — and they made a doozy of a trade early Tuesday morning — was never going to be the collection of players and draft picks they received in return. It was always going to be a player they already had. Tyrese Maxey was the axis on which the deal that Daryl Morey struck with the Los Angeles Clippers revolved, and he’s the reason to believe that the Sixers can retool, and don’t have to rebuild, now that Harden is finally gone.

The haul that Morey got for Harden was fine. It was as good as anyone could have hoped, given the Clippers’ refusal to give up the player the Sixers reportedly coveted most: swingman and stat-stuffer Terance Mann. Mann is versatile, an excellent rebounder and defender, can handle the ball a little, can shoot it a little, and is just 27. It would have been a coup for Morey to acquire him for Harden, a player who had destroyed his own leverage — and much of the Sixers’ — through his pouting, his petulance, and his willingness to submarine the Sixers by becoming more disruptive than he’d already been.

That threat that Harden would keep going rogue — just like he did in his attempt to travel with the team to Milwaukee last week, even though he was inactive — raised the urgency for Morey to trade him sooner than later. Again, what he got was fine. Marcus Morris can step into the tough, edgy quasi-enforcer role that P.J. Tucker filled, and he’s a better offensive threat to boot. Robert Covington brings a little nostalgia with him, since he started his career here as a long-shot success story under Sam Hinkie. But he, KJ Martin, and Nic Batum are bench players and not much more.

Does the deal make the Sixers better this season than they otherwise would have been had Harden been willing to give them a good-faith effort? Probably not. But Morey also coaxed four draft picks, including two first-rounders, from the Clippers, and the contracts of all four players the Sixers got in this trade — Morris, Covington, Martin, and Batum — expire after this season.

That flexibility — that optionality, the term executives like Morey and Hinkie love so much — is huge here, in large part because it frees the Sixers to take care of what should be their top-line agenda item: signing Maxey to a long-term contract.

Yes, Morey now can make another move down the road to maintain the Sixers’ status as a contender in the Eastern Conference. And that chance of winning a championship is vital to keeping Joel Embiid content, to dissuade him from exploring the possibility of playing for another team that he perceives as having a brighter present and future. But Morey couldn’t and wouldn’t have settled, relatively speaking, for a package like the one he got for Harden if Maxey hadn’t already shown that he himself was a franchise player in the making.

His improvement since the Sixers stole him with the 21st pick in the 2020 draft has been startling, if you take a step back and look at his rise in full. You’re talking about someone who raised his three-point-shooting percentage more than 13 points from his rookie season to his third season, from 30.1% in 2020-21 to 43.4% last season. You’re talking about someone who averaged more than 20.3 points last season and, through three games this season, has been the Sixers’ best and most consistent player: 30.3 points a game, a combined 13 rebounds and assists per game, 56% from three. You’re talking about someone whose work ethic and character are, by all accounts, beyond reproach.

You’re talking about someone who turns 23 next week.

Harden was supposed to be the Sixers’ second superstar, the player who, when paired with Embiid, was supposed to lead the team to its first NBA title in four decades. But his presence promised to be the greatest impediment to Maxey’s development into Embiid’s truest and most talented partner at the top of the lineup. Now Maxey doesn’t have to wait for Harden to dribble out the shot clock on so many possessions. Now Maxey gets the ball in his hands more — as a point guard, as a scorer, as the nerve center of the Sixers’ offense. Now Harden’s poison has been flushed from the Sixers’ system, and they get a fresh, clean start with Maxey in a bigger, more important role.

Since Embiid first took the floor for them in 2016, the Sixers have spent so much time searching for the right running mate for him. From Ben Simmons to Harden, from the mistake in letting Jimmy Butler go to the hope that Tobias Harris never quite fulfilled, they have tried and tried and tried. Then Maxey fell to them at No. 21 in 2020, and it is looking more and more like he can be that guy. So they bet big that he can and will. For this trade to turn out a success, he has to be.