The Daryl Morey Doctrine faces its greatest test: Should the Sixers catch an aging star?

Part of me thinks Daryl Morey is too smart of a guy to believe everything he was saying on Monday afternoon.

Another part of me thinks he has no choice.

Either way, the Sixers’ president got at least one thing right.

“This offseason’s a big one,” Morey said.

For his reputation, more than anything.

Since hiring Morey away from the Rockets four years ago, the Sixers’ potential outcomes have been converging on a point where their championship hopes would become entirely dependent on the validity of their architect’s guiding principles. This latest make-or-break juncture is nothing more than the logical conclusion of the Daryl Morey Doctrine in its purest form. The Sixers have two superstars, a potential $65 million in cap space, four tradeable first round picks, and virtually nothing else. The world is their oyster.

The results thus far are mostly a testament to Morey’s ability to execute. I don’t mean that in a back-handed way. Back in the autumn of 2020, the Sixers were widely believed to be stuck in the mud with no way out. Half of their cap space was occupied by contracts that had negative trade value from the moment they were signed. Tobias Harris and Al Horford weren’t going anywhere. Ben Simmons’ contract extension was about to kick in. Josh Richardson was their best semblance of a combo guard.

Enough has happened in the interim to make us forget that we are only now arriving at the end of a Great Unwinding. Harris’ contract, the single greatest roster-building impediment, is no longer on the books. That often goes unmentioned when people talk about the Sixers’ lack of roster continuity. There was a moment during Morey’s end-of-year press conference on Monday when he, somewhat misguidedly, downplayed the notion that continuity is king. The best point in his favor was one he could not make. Harris and Joel Embiid have been together for five-and-a-half seasons. Continuity can be a curse.

It is an accomplishment that the Sixers’ have remained competitive while working toward this point. Each year, they have been one of the three or four teams in the East with a legitimate shot at the conference finals. That they fell short is mostly a testament to the vagaries of chance. Any skepticism about Morey’s vision has to begin with the fact that it has served the Sixers better than many of the alternatives.

That being said, the current moment will dictate the verdict. In the World According to Morey, the Sixers will enter the offseason with the only three ingredients a GM needs to build a contender: one superstar, a second superstar, and the means to acquire a third superstar.

Hopefully, his case is less hollow than the groundwork he began laying on Monday.

It is too early to know whether 34-year-old Paul George would actually leave L.A. for Philadelphia, or whether soon-to-be 35-year-old Butler might actually hit the trade market. Nor do we know if Morey actually willing to stake his credibility and the Sixers future by devoting a big chunk of his hard-earned resources on what could easily end up as James Harden, The Sequel.

But he sure sounded like a guy who would let conventional wisdom deter him.

Less than a year after the Sixers president watched up close as 33-year-old Harden petered out in the Eastern Conference semis, less than a month after he watched Butler miss the Heat’s first-round loss to the Celtics, less than a week after he watched Harden and George lose to the Mavericks and 35-year-old Kevin Durant lose to the Timberwolves in the first round, mere hours before the NBA playoffs were set to resume with young, athletic, cohesive powerhouses in Minnesota, Oklahoma City, Boston, and New York, Morey downplayed the suggestion that what he was seeing was evidence of anything other than the vagaries of chance.

“You have to factor in everything, including age,” Morey said. “My point is that you can’t use the fact that all of those key players are [out of the playoffs] in one season and say this is some new thing. In fact, if anything the direction of the arrow on age is that it is less than an impact than it was in the past.”

I’m not going to dive too deeply into the specific question of modern-day aging curves except to say that whatever data Morey is referencing is based on a far smaller sample than the whole of human physiological history, which shows that speed, strength, endurance, and reaction time peak well before an athlete’s mid-30s and then begin a steady decline that coincides with the rise of stronger, faster, better-trained, younger athletes arriving at even higher physical peaks. If there really is some sort of reliable statistical signal regarding the longevity of All-Star performance within the 134 players in that data set over the last 20 years, it might be worth comparing it to the trends we are seeing in other sports, namely baseball and football, as each new cohort of athletes raises the physical demands of competing.

But, that’s another story for another day.

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There are more important matters at hand. Do Morey and the Sixers really think it wise to go star-hunting in a market in which the only stars are several years removed from their peak, not to mention their greatest postseason successes?

Multiple things can be true at the same time. Take George, an athletic, sharpshooting, defensive presence who will be 35 years old by next year’s conference semifinals. You couldn’t find a better third star to fit alongside Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. Put him on this year’s team, and the Sixers currently have a 1-0 lead over the Pacers en route to the conference finals.

At the same time, there is considerable reason to question whether he will be that player once the playoffs arrive. He played 74 games this season, but no more than 56 in any of the previous four. This was also his first playoff appearance since 2020-21. The Clippers did not make the postseason in 2021-22. George was hurt in 2022-23.

“This offseason’s a big one,” Morey said on Monday.

He is right about that. It’s a big one for the Sixers, and also for the Daryl Morey Doctrine.

Morey’s reputation needs no introduction. He is both lauded and vilified as an executive who operates as if championship rosters are inherently transitory things, decks to be dealt and reshuffled at regular intervals. Every season is a new game of 15-card draw. You hold onto your established stars and use the rest of your hand to go fish for a third of a kind. The two ingredients that matter most to a championship chef are stars and the means to acquire more stars.

The Sixers’ current straits are little more than an extreme test case of the stars-or-bust philosophy in its purest form.

They have three rotation players under contract, $65 million to spend, and four tradable first-round picks. Will the 2024 offseason turn out to be proof positive, or reductio ad absurdum? Those are the stakes.

Hypothetically, at least.

As I noted earlier, I’m not convinced that Morey’s guiding principles are as extreme as perceived. His track record with the Sixers suggests neither a man on tilt nor one who lacks an appreciation for, well, appreciation.

Morey never traded Maxey, for instance. There were several junctures when he might have explored doing so in exchange for a more established star. Kyle Lowry and Damian Lillard both had their advocates within the fan base and media, once upon a time. As recently as the beginning of this season, there was some doubt as to whether Maxey had superstar potential. On Monday, Morey himself acknowledged his uncertainty that his guard would become the kind of player who could single-handedly dominate a playoff game the way he did at various points during the Sixers’ first-round loss to the Knicks. Yet Maxey is still here.

De’Anthony Melton is another example. Two years ago, Morey traded a first-round pick for the Grizzlies guard, then 24 years old and a consummate role player. Who knows — if not for a back injury that derailed his season, Melton might have become the Sixers’ version of Josh Hart or Donte DiVincenzo, a young, value-laden acquisition who proved himself a critical thread in the fabric of the team.

In a perfect world, the Sixers would be entering their offseason with the flexibility and assets to add a third star, plus half of their playoff rotation already filled with Melton and Paul Reed joining Maxey and Joel Embiid as no-doubt-about-it returnees. It hasn’t played out that way. But we are talking about guiding principles here, not the execution of them.

That being said ...

Even if the Morey Doctrine isn’t as extreme as some portend, it still goes something like this:

1. There is a small handful of players who are true difference makers on a basketball court.

2. There is a bare minimum level of difference-making talent that a team must have, without which it cannot win a championship.

3. The best way to increase a team’s championship odds is to increase its level of difference-making talent.

4. A team like the Sixers should seek to maximize its championship odds this year and next year to the exclusion of the following year, to the exclusion of everything beyond.

It is in this championship-or-bust mentality where the (potential) logical hole in the argument exists. You might call it the James Harden Fallacy.

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If you maximize your championship odds for one or two seasons by going all-in for the best available superstar, and you do not actually win a championship, and then that superstar leaves, and you end up losing in the first round and heading into an offseason with two viable rotation members under contract ... are you any closer to a title than you were when you began?

It’s a tough question to answer. You can invent any number of counterfactuals on either side of the argument, none of them reliable. The trade for Harden in 2022 was hardly the disaster many insist. The Sixers traded two first-round picks in the deal for him. They acquired two first-round picks when they traded him away. In doing so, they shed Ben Simmons’ contract, which right now would probably require at least one additional first-round pick to trade away.

That being said, the Sixers are where they are.

It’s the same place they’ll find themselves if they go all-in on another aging superstar who is less than the player they thought they were getting. As Morey noted, there are multiple ways to build a championship contender. Hopefully, he is keeping the less-familiar ones under wraps.