The Sixers are going free-agent shopping. They’ve previously hit the market with mixed results.

As NBA free agency gets underway starting Sunday, the 76ers will be at the center of everything. That’s what happens when only a handful of your players are under contract for next season — and, relatedly, when you lead the NBA in practical salary-cap space to spend this offseason.

Some moves are obvious for Daryl Morey and his front office: Restricted free agent Tyrese Maxey is coming back on a max deal once all of the other moves are complete, a formality on hold simply because of the intricacies of the NBA’s salary cap rules. But beyond that, there’s a whole universe of possibilities involving players returning from the 2023-24 roster and new names from the free-agent market.

With that in mind, let’s take a look back at how the Sixers have done in each of those areas recently.

» READ MORE: Following routine NBA draft, anticipation hovers as Sixers prepare to join free-agency flurry

At my Substack last week, I took free agency data from Spotrac — an indispensable resource for NBA offseason information — and calculated the surplus value for each contract handed out from 2011 through 2023, based on how many more Estimated RAPTOR Wins Above Replacement the player generated than we’d expect from the salary-cap space the player took up. We can then add this up by team to see which ones made the wisest free-agent calls over that span — including extensions to retain players and deals to bring in new faces.

You can find the full list, broken out by players and teams, here. But right now, we’re concerned with the Sixers and their track record. Let’s start with the good part: They’ve gotten a lot of value from extending their own free agents over the years. From the summer of 2011 through last year, Philly has re-signed 19 players who had an expected value of 82.0 WAR based on their share of the salary cap. That group collectively produced 92.9 WAR over the lifetime of those deals, so the Sixers came out ahead by 10.9 wins of surplus value — which ranked seventh-best among all NBA teams during that span of offseasons.

The best surplus value of the bunch belonged to Thaddeus Young, a perennially underrated all-around player whose 2011 extension took up only 15.2% of the salary cap per season on average but saw him generate 29.2 WAR — 13.1 more than we’d expect from his cap hit. (It’s worth noting that Young was traded to Minnesota in the middle of the deal, but this methodology gives the Sixers credit for his value throughout the contract, since they were the ones who originally signed it.)

Other notable deals included James Harden’s 2022 extension — no, the relationship between Harden and the Sixers didn’t end well, but he still provided 4.1 more wins than expected — Furkan Korkmaz’s two-year deal from 2019 (2.3 WAR per year while making just 1.6% of the cap), J.J. Redick’s one-year contract in 2018 (5.6 WAR on 12.0% of the cap that year), and Paul Reed’s current deal (2.5 WAR while making 5.9% of the cap last season).

Not every re-signing has gone so well. Tobias Harris provided 1.5 fewer wins than expected from his 33% cap share over the past five seasons. Spencer Hawes’ 2012 deal ranked right next to Harris, and Danny Green and Lavoy Allen’s contracts were even worse. But the Sixers have mostly avoided huge mistakes in the extension game, which helped them to a solid ranking.

Where they’ve fared less well, however, is when shopping for free-agent talent from other teams. They’ve signed 48 players that way since 2011, the fifth-most of any team, but those players have generated 20.5 WAR against an expectation of 46.2 based on the cap space they occupied. That 25.8-win shortfall is third-worst in the NBA during the 13-year period we examined, ahead of only the Sacramento Kings and the Orlando Magic (whose minus-47.8 surplus WAR is a shocking outlier unto itself):

Some Sixer contracts delivered good returns on investment. For instance, one-year fliers on Andre Drummond — who was dealt to Brooklyn in the Harden-Ben Simmons trade — and Kelly Oubre Jr. yielded surplus values of 2.7 wins apiece, ranking among the team’s best value deals since 2011. And Redick’s first deal from the Clippers to the Sixers was worth 1.7 surplus WAR.

But most of the Sixers’ external signings generated less than we’d expect.

Among their 13 free agent additions since 2011 that made at least 2.4% of the cap per season, 12 of them (all but Redick in 2017) delivered negative surplus value — from Amir Johnson and Nick Young to Kwame Brown and Gerald Henderson. Worst among the deals? Al Horford, who was still technically on his Sixers contract up until last season, generated 3.8 fewer WAR than expected based on his 25% annual salary-cap share. And while P.J. Tucker and Jerryd Bayless made less relative to the cap — around 9% each — they combined to be worth roughly 10 wins less than expected during their Philly contracts.

Of course, the Sixers also haven’t taken all that many big swings at other teams’ free agents over the years anyway. Perhaps it’s because they spent so many years of the era captured by our data mired in “The Process,” shunning high-priced players in general, but Philadelphia only signed three external free agents to deals worth 10% or more of the cap per season. (The average team in that span did that 4.4 times, and the Knicks did it a league-high 11 times.)

Will that change this year? We still don’t know how things will play out in Morey’s search for another star to pair with Maxey and Joel Embiid. But if the Sixers do look to make a big splash with a newly signed free agent, they’ll have to overcome the team’s negative track record in that area over the past 13 years.

The 76ers are gearing up for a crucial free-agency period beginning at 6 p.m. Sunday. With ample salary-cap space available, the Sixers are in position to make significant moves to bolster their roster around All-Stars Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. Join Inquirer beat reporters Gina Mizell and Keith Pompey, as they recap the flurry of initial signings for the Sixers and around the league at noon on Monday.