Daryl Morey gives glimpse inside sagas of Ben Simmons, James Harden at MIT Sloan conference

BOSTON — Moderator Deepak Malhotra posed a “completely hypothetical” scenario to Daryl Morey, which immediately drew roaring laughter from the audience.

“You have a player on your roster that didn’t want to play for your team …” Malhotra, a Harvard Business School professor, said Saturday at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

“It’s really sad that I don’t know which one you’re talking about,” Morey quipped in response.

Morey then used the topic — which was part of an NBA front-office panel called “Behind the Scenes in Sports Negotiating: What the Fans and Media Don’t Get to See” — as a way to provide a glimpse into how he navigated the public sagas involving former 76ers stars Ben Simmons and James Harden. Both demanded trades in a span of less than two years.

“Even though the media is saying, ‘Trade him. Trade him. Trade him,’ every single day,” said Morey, the Sixers’ president of basketball operations since 2020, “it matters that you have a job to do. You were hired to represent the interests of the Philadelphia 76ers, and this is a very valuable player, and you have to make sure you get the timing right.”

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Morey more specifically referenced the Simmons situation, which lingered until the blockbuster deal with the Brooklyn Nets at the 2022 trade deadline that, coincidentally, brought Harden to the Sixers. Morey said he did not rush a Simmons trade because the Sixers had boasted the Eastern Conference’s best regular-season record in 2020-21, and that the version of Simmons that season was “the best defensive perimeter player I’ve ever had on a team.”

“It was just constantly going back to the data,” Morey said, “going back to the things that are sort of ground truth, and saying, ‘We can’t lose our mindset. This guy is a really good player.’ …

“You want to get to where there’s either multiple bidders, or the other side is [to] correctly convince [other teams] that you have the credibility that, ‘OK, you’re going to go through the pain.’ Because the other side is gambling that, ‘OK, the owner will cave. The pressure will come eventually, where they will give away this very good asset for less than they should.’

“That’s how a lot of deals happen in this league, so you have to fight it.”

The Harden conundrum — which included the star guard exercising his player option instead of entering last summer’s free-agent market, simultaneously requesting a trade, then calling Morey a “liar” at a shoe event in China — was resolved in a much quicker timetable. The Sixers dealt Harden to the Los Angeles Clippers about a week into the regular season for a package that included Nico Batum, Robert Covington, Marcus Morris Sr. (who was then moved at last month’s trade deadline), KJ Martin, and draft capital.

Also on this front-office panel were Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison, Sacramento Kings general manager Monte McNair, and Mavericks senior adviser (and former Utah Jazz general manager) Dennis Lindsey. The discussion often turned to the variety of stakeholders involved in any player personnel move, and the persuasion sometimes required by executives such as Morey to get deals over the finish line.

That topic yielded a nugget about new Sixers point guard Kyle Lowry, whom Morey acquired in a 2009 trade while he was the Houston Rockets’ general manager. To get the 22-year-old Lowry from the Memphis Grizzlies, the Rockets traded Rafer Alston, then the starting point guard on a team that would eventually win 53 regular-season games.

Lowry, though, blossomed into a starter during three-plus seasons with the Rockets, before becoming a six-time All-Star and NBA champion with the Toronto Raptors.

“You have the newspaper saying, ‘What the heck are they doing trading their starting point guard? This guy [Lowry] has never played. He’s too small,’ ” Morey said. “There’s a level of risk, especially early in your career. … It adds a real drama to deals when you’re like, ‘OK, is this the one I’m going to bet on?’

“Because if you make a bet, especially early in your career, like, ‘This is the move I’m going to [make] and push people to’ and it goes wrong, you may not be in the job as long as you hoped.”

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Morey also credited Brett Gunning, who was a Villanova assistant during Lowry’s career before joining the Rockets as their director of player development, with persuading then-coach Rick Adelman that Lowry “is going to be good in the locker room, and he’s probably going to be a lot better [as a player] than you think.”

”Those kinds of conversations push a deal to the end,” Morey said. “Where if Rick, at the time, had, like, really pounded the table [and said], ‘This is crazy,’ that deal maybe doesn’t happen.”

Another Sixers connection during Saturday’s Sloan programming was Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul, who represents All-Star guard Tyrese Maxey. When asked about the qualities he looks for in potential clients, Paul used Maxey as an example of the blend of talent and character.

Paul added he needed to “beg” Morey to select Maxey with the 21st pick in the 2020 NBA draft, because Maxey shot only 29.2% from three-point range during his one season at Kentucky.

“We’re both happy,” Paul said Saturday, two weeks after Maxey made his first All-Star appearance.