The Sixers got older. They tried to get wiser. And this season, their plan might just work.

So here are your 2024-25 Philadelphia 76ers:

Joel Embiid is 30. His backup, Andre Drummond, is 31.

Paul George is 34. So is his friend Reggie Jackson, one of the team’s backup point guards.

Eric Gordon is 35. Kyle Lowry is 38.

“We’re old,” George said Monday. “I get it.”

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It was a bone-dry one-liner in response to a natural and obvious question: OK, the Sixers might be old, but are they too old?

Daryl Morey and his player-personnel department didn’t exactly hide their aim and intentions in the offseason. They couldn’t. Everyone already knew that the Sixers were in win-now mode, so they signed George — the top free agent on the market — and loaded up on veterans.

Sure, a rundown of the roster could have started with Tyrese Maxey (23), Kelly Oubre (28), and Caleb Martin (29). But among the players expected to be primary contributors, there won’t be a lot of development to wait on this season. No hoping that Ben Simmons or Markelle Fultz finally learns how to shoot. No wishful thinking that Tobias Harris, as he enters his prime, will at long last justify his max deal. No wondering how much Maxey will contribute as a rookie.

The most important Sixers have track records. It’s the best reason to believe that this team can actually — perish the thought! — reach the Eastern Conference finals and even challenge for a championship.

“We all have aged well,” George said. “I still feel youthful. I still feel young. And I still feel I can play at a high level. The beauty of it is in having the youth around us in KO, Caleb Martin, Tyrese. You need those engines as well. You need those young legs as well. It’s just a good mixture we have here. We have the veterans who know how to win when it matters. But then you have the guys who can get us to that point where we can put our imprint, whether it’s late in games or late in the season.

“It’s having that balance. You can’t have too many on the older spectrum, and teams aren’t ready to win on the younger spectrum. We’re right in the middle where you need to be to compete for a championship.”

He’s not wrong, purely from a numbers standpoint. Take those nine players already mentioned here: Embiid, George, Maxey, Oubre, Martin, Drummond, Gordon, Lowry, Jackson. The average age among them is 31.3, a number that figures to drop depending on which less-experienced players — such as KJ Martin (23), Ricky Council IV (23), and Jared McCain (20) — stay on the roster and how much they play.

» READ MORE: Joel Embiid expects to ‘take a step back’ to allow the Sixers’ new additions to share the scoring load

The truth of the NBA is that youth doesn’t win championships, not anymore. Among the 10 youngest title teams in history, only one, the 2014-2015 Golden State Warriors, won its championship after 1980. This is a league of men. Here and there and for short periods of time, Morey has brought in players who fit that profile: P.J. Tucker, Nico Batum, Danny Green. But he hadn’t collected such a large group of them at one time.

“The opportunities just don’t come along like that,” Morey said Monday. They did this summer, and they allowed Morey to assemble what should be the best and deepest supporting cast Embiid has had here. Better than the perimeter-oriented group of 2017-18. Better than the top-heavy roster, with Jimmy Butler and JJ Redick, in 2018-19. Better than the “bully ball” disaster with Al Horford in 2019-20. Better than the James Harden-centric teams of 2022-23. This team promises to have a toughness and an edge that those didn’t.

“You always have a pretty good idea of what you need around Joel,” Sixers coach Nick Nurse said. “Everybody’s obvious answer is going to be, ‘Let’s make sure there’s a lot of shooting so there’s space for him to play and there are ways to punish teams when they send a lot of people to him.’

“But I like the one [Morey] touched on — guys to go to war with, veteran guys who know how to handle the fight, know how to handle the pressure, been in playoffs, those kinds of things,” Nurse said.

For his part, Embiid said Monday that the Sixers’ overall style of play or players has mattered less to him than the franchise’s lack of stability has: “It’s about just consistency. When you play with the same guys for a couple of years, everybody knows what they have to do. They understand what it takes, the culture.”

Truth be told, that aspect — culture — has been the most challenging for the Sixers to create and cultivate during the Embiid era. The turnover in the front office, on the coaching staff, on the roster; the bizarre actions and departures of Bryan Colangelo, Ben Simmons, and Harden; Embiid’s own immaturity: All of those factors and more have led to this decade of disappointment since his arrival. The Sixers’ plan this season is to try aging out of all that nonsense. Their plan is to win with men. It might just work.