The Sixers have some building blocks along with Paul George. Kelly Oubre Jr. could be one.

The first rule of summer league is to pay no attention to summer league.

The second rule of summer league is to disregard the first rule.

The greatest triumph of Daryl Morey’s offseason was split in two and separated by a few thousand miles on Tuesday afternoon. On one coast, there were Jared McCain and Adem Bona looking like a couple of players who could carve out a role in an NBA rotation within a year or two. There was Ricky Council IV dropping 29 points and hitting 5-of-10 threes. On the other coast, there was 28-year-old Kelly Oubre Jr. talking about all of those things he was still determined to do to fulfill the promise he flashed as a 20-year-old rookie in his first summer league. There was 28-year-old Caleb Martin, soon-to-be sixth-year pro, talking about a contract that will keep him in a Sixers uniform for at least the next three years.

» READ MORE: With playoff dynamo Caleb Martin, Sixers go from Big Three to Legit Five

There was youth. There was upside. There were the makings of the thing that the Sixers have long lacked, a solution for a deficit publicly bemoaned by their longest-tenured and oft-frustrated superstar.

Continuity. Organic growth. Ideological consistency. Dare we say … culture?

“There were definitely [other] options on the table,” Oubre said Tuesday while discussing the two-year, $16 million contract that kept him a Sixer. “But at the end of the day, it’s all about situations, all about fit, all about the people I’m working with and working for. That just superseded everything else, because I didn’t necessarily want to move my family to a new place just to go and meet new people and have to do this all over again. I don’t want to say finish what I started, because I don’t plan on being done. This is just a step to where I want to be at. This was a place where I felt safe, I felt comfortable, I felt happy, and I fell in love with the game of basketball here, so why would I go anywhere else?”

It’s funny. As good as Paul George is, as transformative as his presence can be, the signing of Oubre might be the most encouraging move of the Sixers’ summer. The mercurial forward arrived in Philadelphia last summer as the kind of player whom a good team makes better. He wasn’t a reclamation project so much as an unfinished entity. Every championship team seems to find one during its final approach to a title. Golden State had Andre Iguodala. Denver had Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Milwaukee had Bobby Portis. They are players with a certain type of athleticism and grit in search of a situation that can turn their flashes of talent into something more sustained.

Oubre began to emerge as such a player last season. His final numbers didn’t look a whole lot different from previous seasons: 15.4 points per game, 31.1% from three-point range, 5.0 rebounds, a .535 true shooting percentage. But numbers don’t always capture fit. Sometimes, they lag behind the realization of a role.

In a playoff atmosphere, against the grittiest of opponents, the Sixers saw Oubre elevate his game. By the end of their six-game slugfest with the Knicks, he had emerged as an essential element of whatever they were, of the team they wanted to become. In the last four games of the series, Oubre averaged 16.3 points and shot 38.1% from three while anchoring their perimeter defense for 40 minutes per night. In their series-ending loss in Game 6, he was on the bench for exactly 5 minutes and 22 seconds.

» READ MORE: Paul George was the Sixers’ only hope for a title. The risk is big. The odds speak for themselves.

It would have been a shame if the experiment ended there.

“It was just a different side of basketball that I haven’t really seen in my career,” Oubre said. “The professionalism, the inspiration all around me. You’ve got greats, got All-Stars around me that I’ve been able to gain respect from. It’s kind of tough to do that your first year in the organization or program. I’ve been in a couple now and you always need two or three years to win everybody over a little bit or allow them to see who you are. But in my first year it was like, it happened really fast. I put in a lot of work to be where I am but at the end of the day, you know, I’m still finding myself out of a hole last year and I think this is a place to really get me back to a place where I know I need to be.”

There is upside there. Perhaps not as much as there is with McCain, the 19-year-old sharpshooter and NCAA Tournament star whom the Sixers drafted at No. 16. The timeline for a 28-year-old on a two-year deal is much shorter than it is for a player like Bona, the 6-foot-8 bundle of lean muscle and energy the Sixers nabbed in the second round. But two years this summer could easily become four years next summer, and for a much larger bag of coins. Which puts Oubre in the same company as the Sixers’ two rookies, as well as the second-year unknown they have in Council. Oubre is a potential building block for a foundation that can exist with or without George and Joel Embiid.

The big risk with George was never the player himself. I don’t mean to diminish the unknowns. They were significant. They are significant. Those unknowns remain. Even the greatest players do not stay great forever. It can be difficult to project when the end will come. The Sixers are a great team on paper largely because, on paper, George is the player he was in 2023-24 rather than the one he will be moving forward. They will not look nearly as good if George is only 80% of that player. Or, worse, if he is injured or worn down when the postseason arrives.

Yet, those risks are mostly the cost of doing business. The big risk the Sixers faced was an existential one. A philosophical one. The big risk was that they would not be able to hedge the other risks. That their pursuit of George would come at the expense of the sort of moves that might nudge them in the direction of actual organization building.

» READ MORE: Jared McCain has a lot of Steph Curry traits. The Sixers were wise not to pass that up.

The signings of Oubre and Martin, the drafting of McCain and Bona, the preservation of their future draft picks — they offer some reason to hope that the George era will look a lot different from the ones centered around James Harden, Al Horford, Tobias Harris, and Jimmy Butler.

“This summer, I’m going to be able to build off the things I brought to the table last year,” Oubre said.

It’s refreshing thing to hear.