Bradley Beal will not be a Sixer, and that’s very much a good thing

The NBA’s free agent signing period is still a couple of weeks away, but the Sixers already have their first win. A tangential win, but a win nonetheless.

Just in case you happened to spend your Sunday doing something other than monitoring the offseason trade market, the Wizards and Suns reportedly agreed to a deal that will send star guard Bradley Beal to Phoenix to replace Chris Paul as the third wheel alongside Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. It’s a significant deal, one that will surely be hyped as altering the balance of power in the Western Conference. There’s also a good chance it fails to live up to that billing.

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Beal, a three-time All-Star who made All-NBA two years ago and is still a week shy of his 30th birthday, has a superstar’s stat line and the potential to push the Suns across the finish line in their race for their first NBA championship. He also has an injury history that makes Joel Embiid look like an iron man and a track record of presiding over mediocre-to-worse teams.

Will Beal flourish in his new role as an ensemble cast member? For the Sixers, all that matters is that somebody else will be finding out.

The Beal deal may not have a direct impact on the Sixers’ chances for 2022-23, but it does solve a couple of potential problems as they prepare to navigate the summer free agent signing period. First and foremost, it eliminates the Suns as a potential destination for James Harden. It’s unclear, even doubtful, if Phoenix was even a remote possibility on that front. But even the appearance of such could have strengthened Harden’s hand in negotiations with the Sixers, who remain hopeful that they can re-sign him to a new contract once he opts out of the one year remaining on his current deal. Even if Harden’s camp didn’t actively attempt to create that appearance, they certainly weren’t going to object if it was created for them.

Now?

Assuming all of the initial reporting is correct, the Suns have made their move. They were arguably the contender most likely to make one. You can throw the Sixers and Heat into that mix, too. Not surprisingly, all three were mentioned as potential landing places for Beal as it became clearer that new Wizards president Michael Winger was planning on hitting the reset button. That may have been something more than idle speculation when it came to the Heat. For the Sixers, Beal never made much sense.

There are plenty of people who will disagree with that last assertion. Beal’s talent is undeniable. He’s one of a small handful of shooters in the league that has the size, quickness and handle to consistently create his own shots. He is coming off the most efficient scoring season of his career, averaging 1.31 points per shot attempt with a .551 effective field goal percentage. Over the last five years, he is averaging 27.0 points on 20.6 attempts per game. There aren’t many guys in the league who have the ability to generate that kind of productive volume.

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All of which leads to natural follow-up question: if Beal is that guy, why haven’t the Wizards been that team? They’ve finished at least four games under .500 in each of the last five seasons and at least 12 games under in four of them. That stretch happened to coincide with John Wall’s evaporation as an All-NBA point guard. In the six years Beal was paired with Wall, the Wizards made three conference semis. They haven’t sniffed one since.

That’s a problem for the Sixers. Harden is a point guard, and a darn good one. If he leaves, their top priority will be replacing him with someone who is capable of playing point. Maybe Tyrese Maxey can become that guy, but he wasn’t anything close to it last season. Don’t let Harden’s regression as a scorer distract from his elite facilitation skills. That’s what the Sixers lacked before he arrived. It’s the problem he was acquired to solve, and it’s the problem that will exist if he leaves. Beal would not have solved that problem.

Even if Beal had remained on the market, I don’t think the Sixers would have been tempted to lock themselves into the kind of risk and intractability posed by a 30-year-old player who has played 90 games over the last two seasons and is owed $207 million with a no-trade. Thus far, they are approaching things the way they need to. Harden may not be a perfect option, but he is the best one, and re-signing him makes tons of sense at the right level of risk.

Beal is better off elsewhere. We’ll see if elsewhere is better off with him.

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