Ranking the hypotheticals for the Sixers on NBA draft night

A few things nobody will dispute with regard to the Sixers and this year’s NBA draft.

Assuming all of these are universally accepted, I’m not sure how anybody can have a hard opinion about what Daryl Morey and his front office should do in the first round on Wednesday night.

Should they trade the pick for a role player, à la De’Anthony Melton in 2022? Flip the pick for a star player? Flip the pick for a future pick? Draft the best available player?

Well, it depends.

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The draft calculus is the same for every team, in every sport, assuming a certain level of executive competence (no offense, Dave Gettleman). You assign a grade to each player’s ceiling and floor, and assign a series of probabilities to the range in between. Then, you decide how lucky you feel, and how much you trust your scouts, and you compare all of that to whatever trade options you have on the table.

Unfortunately, none of us is privy to the information we’d need in order to formulate a worthwhile opinion on the direction the Sixers should turn. Rather than blowing smoke, let’s focus on the hypotheticals and rank the potential outcomes in order of priority.

This is obviously the dream scenario, but it is unlikely to be anything more than a dream. Look how long the Celtics had to wait before finding the perfect complements to Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Brandon Ingram isn’t that player. Zach LaVine isn’t that player. Jimmy Butler is that player, but I’m highly skeptical that is on the table right now. Frankly, any other player who fits the bill almost certainly isn’t getting traded, let alone on draft night. Bridges and Lauri Markkanen are great options until the alarm clock goes off.

Here is where my philosophy might differentiate from the Sixers’. During his year-end news conference, Morey noted that he won’t be banking on any immediate help from this year’s pick. Remember, Maxey averaged just 15 minutes per game as a rookie.

“Immediate help probably never comes in the draft,” Morey said. “There’s really only something less than 10 but greater than five players picked in the range we’re picking in that are good in the first year. That said, we don’t really focus on the draft for help now.”

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The big question is how Morey and the Sixers are defining “now.” In the past, he has spoken of basing his decisions on a time horizon of one to three years. Anything beyond that is too uncertain to dictate the present. More recently, his rhetoric suggests that time horizon has shrunk drastically toward the front end. My sense is that the Sixers are operating in year-to-year mode. Do whatever it takes to put the best team on the court for the upcoming season and ignore the potential regrets.

To me, this is where the trickiest — and most hazardous — decisions lie. Look back to 2022, when the Sixers traded the No. 23 pick (David Roddy) along with Danny Green to the Grizzlies for De’Anthony Melton. Melton clearly helped the Sixers more in his first season than, say, Nikola Jović, who logged just 13 postseason minutes as a rookie after the Heat drafted him at No. 27. But Jović in Year 2 was a legitimate rotation player who ended up averaging 25 minutes and shooting 40% from three-point range in the playoffs. More importantly, he looked like a player with some considerable upside at the age of 20.

There are a few players besides Jović who make for interesting thought experiments, including Andrew Nembhard (No. 31) and Christian Braun (No. 21). There are a lot more who illustrate the case for trading for veteran certainty.

At the end of the day, the Melton trade didn’t work nearly as well as it could have in theory. The Sixers could not have predicted the back injury that derailed his 2023-24 season and left him as a bystander in the playoffs. But the thought process was sound: Instead of taking a chance on the odds that a rookie player would develop into even a competent championship-caliber role player, the Sixers traded the pick for a player who had already established himself as such, was signed to a reasonable contract, and was still in the early stages of his prime.

» READ MORE: The Sixers pick outside the lottery — and that’s not the worst thing

More specifically, draft a player who has a reasonable chance to serve as the backup big man and long-term sub that the Sixers have lacked throughout the Joel Embiid era. I’ve mentioned the name Yves Missi several times this offseason as an example. The Sixers recently had him in for a workout, but who knows what that really means. Braun, the former Kansas star who contributed to the Nuggets’ backcourt as a rookie, is another good example of a profile that would make a lot of sense for the Sixers.

The Sixers need to win now. But they are also going to need to win whenever now ends. They can’t afford to ignore the second part of that.