Daryl Morey’s trade for De’Anthony Melton shows he still has to fix the Sixers’ own mistakes

Daryl Morey and the 76ers can do nothing in a vacuum. It would be nice for them if they could. Then, the trade that Morey made Thursday night during the NBA draft, sending Danny Green, Green’s cumbersome contract, and the No. 23 pick to the Memphis Grizzlies for De’Anthony Melton, would be seen as a step forward and only as a step forward for the franchise.

In Melton, the Sixers acquired a solid, well-rounded guard who is just 24 years old, who is on a team-friendly contract, and who improves them immediately. That’s what a club that aspires to win a championship but advanced only to the playoffs’ second round is supposed to do. It’s supposed to do what it has to do to get better.

“We’re trying to win now,” Morey told reporters at the team’s headquarters in Camden early Friday morning, choosing his words carefully because the trade had not become official yet. “We’re looking for players who can contribute. We were the number-one defense two years ago. We were good last year. We want to make sure we improve that. So if we can get a perimeter defender maybe for a draft pick, we’d feel very good about that.”

» READ MORE: De’Anthony Melton is a perfect fit, but Daryl Morey and the Sixers have only just begun

There was a lot to Morey’s answer, starting with his acknowledgement of what everyone already knew to be true: A team that has, as its two centerpiece stars, a 28-year-old center prone to debilitating injury and a 32-year-old scorer/point guard who is aging as if he drank from a false Holy Grail isn’t set up well to play the tortoise in the race for a championship. Joel Embiid still hasn’t finished a season unscathed, and after 13 seasons in the NBA, James Harden probably has only so many electrifying nights left in him — only so many on the court, at least.

The Sixers will try to wring every last drop of greatness out of those two, which means Morey will try to surround Embiid and Harden with supplementary players with particular sets of skills, namely good three-point shooting and excellent perimeter defense. Which is what made Morey’s last sentence ironic, and bitterly so.

Melton has those skills, and he fits the profile of an ideal complementary player for Embiid and Harden. But the Sixers already have a player who by now was supposed to fit that profile. It was just three years ago, at the 2019 draft, that they acquired Matisse Thybulle — “a perimeter defender” if there ever was one.

And there’s the problem. Thybulle is nothing more than a perimeter defender. He’s a terrific one, maybe the best in the league, but he is so one-dimensional that he has rendered himself useless half the time he’s on the floor. His offensive game has stagnated at best and regressed at worst since he entered the NBA, and his ability to give the Sixers a shot in the arm was limited last season by his unwillingness to get one himself.

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In another set of circumstances or conditions, perhaps the Sixers could afford to be patient with Thybulle, to give him more time to develop a jump shot. But they don’t have that kind of time, not with these iterations of Embiid and Harden, not with Thybulle’s contract set to expire after next season, not with the team’s lack of depth. That final factor is the most frustrating of all. It’s the reason that Morey’s attempts to improve the team now can’t be isolated from all the turbulence and misguided machinations that came before him.

Morey had to trade for Melton not merely because Thybulle didn’t develop as the Sixers hoped. Morey had to trade for Melton because, at the ‘19 draft, then-general manager Elton Brand and the Sixers made their affection for Thybulle so obvious that Danny Ainge and the Celtics — and doesn’t this sound familiar? — threatened to draft Thybulle themselves, forcing the Sixers to give up two draft picks to get him. Morey had to trade for Melton because the Sixers, for a precious few minutes at the 2018 draft, had Mikal Bridges, who soon enough would become an elite perimeter player, and they gave him up for Zhaire Smith and a fruitless first-round pick.

Morey had to trade for Melton because Ben Simmons turned out to be … Ben Simmons, and Morey had to trade him.

Put simply, Morey had to trade for Melton and is reportedly fielding offers for Thybulle and Tobias Harris because, more than six years after Sam Hinkie plied them with plenty of assets before walking out the door, the Sixers are still spinning their wheels.

This move makes them better, sure, but it’s a move that they never should have had to make. That period, from the moment Hinkie left to the moment Morey arrived, was devastating for the franchise, and the damage lingers, and the greatest test of Daryl Morey’s instincts and acumen as an executive will be whether he can clean it up.