The Sixers’ path to Paul George was months in the making, but these dominoes still needed to fall

The 76ers pulled off free agency’s biggest splash, landing perennial All-Star forward Paul George on a four-year, $212 million max contract.

But that acquisition is not only the result of a free-agency meeting, where George met with Julius Erving and Josh Harris while wearing an Allen Iverson T-shirt as Sunday turned to Monday. Several dominoes needed to fall correctly over the course of several months, for the Sixers to be in position to lure George away from his hometown Los Angeles Clippers.

The Sixers emphatically created an alternative path once James Harden demanded a trade last summer.

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They planned for more than a year, correctly predicting that teams would be spooked by roster-building restrictions in the new collective bargaining agreement.

And they needed to catch a break from the Clippers, who would not budge on one critical aspect during their months-long negotiations with George.

Here is a breakdown of how it happened:

Last offseason, the leaguewide expectation was that Harden would decline his $35.6 million player option for the 2023-24 season, become an unrestricted free agent, and sign a longer-term deal with the Sixers or Houston Rockets.

Instead, Harden surprisingly exercised that option the day before free agency opened and subsequently demanded a trade to his hometown Clippers.

Harden felt ghosted by the Sixers, confirming later that “I wanted to get paid. They weren’t talking.” But the Sixers had been penalized for tampering in the summer of 2022 because they negotiated too early with P.J. Tucker and Danuel House — moves that were possible because Harden took a pay cut. The Sixers also were unwilling to hinder their short- or long-term future by signing Harden to an overly lucrative, long-term deal.

It also is possible that the Rockets, who had just hired Ime Udoka as their new coach and were anchored by a young core, no longer were as interested in Harden as on Christmas Day, when a report broke that he was considering returning to the place where he became a scoring champion and MVP. Such a shift would have limited Harden’s value on the open market, making that guaranteed player-option money especially attractive.

Either way, things turned messy — particularly when Harden called Daryl Morey, his longtime confidant and the Sixers’ president of basketball operations, “a liar” and vowed to never play for a team he ran again.

It also gave the Sixers a crystal-clear sign that it was time to pivot.

The Inquirer published a story in early August outlining how the Sixers could proceed without Harden — even if he remained on the roster but refused to play for the entire 2023-24 season — and prepare to build around newly crowned NBA MVP Joel Embiid and rising star Tyrese Maxey. Though there were more possible player targets back then, the Sixers believed they would be better financially situated than any other contender for the summer of 2024 — and also had the option to make a move in the interim if the right player became available. Another advantageous wrinkle: This plan aligned with Tobias Harris’ hefty five-year, $180 million deal coming off the books.

But if Harden had never turned disgruntled — and he signed any deal with the Sixers that lasted beyond one season — his salary on the books for 2024-25 almost certainly would have prevented the Sixers from offering any players a max contract this summer.

A massive component of this post-Harden plan was that the Sixers needed to wait a year to offer Maxey his rookie contract extension. That would significantly reduce his “cap hold” to $13 million in the 2024 offseason, maintaining the space needed to have a max slot available.

So Maxey watched as colleagues from his draft class — including Anthony Edwards, Tyrese Haliburton, and LaMelo Ball — inked their eye-popping new deals. But Maxey never mentioned it publicly unless directly asked about it. His actions mirrored his words that he cares most about winning.

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The patience also paid off for Maxey personally. He took another impressive leap as the lead guard during the 2023-24 season, became a first-time All-Star, and won the NBA’s Most Improved Player award. And if the Sixers ever had any hopes of beginning negotiations with an offer for anything less than the max, those swiftly went out the window.

Hours after the George news broke, Maxey had agreed in principle on a five-year, $204 million deal.

Though Morey remained steadfast that he would not trade Harden for a subpar return package, a deal with the Clippers materialized days after the start of the season.

Coming back to the Sixers were four players on expiring contracts — Nico Batum, Robert Covington, Marcus Morris Sr., and KJ Martin — and draft picks. Those were valuable assets for potential in-season trades and helped the Sixers replenish the draft capital lost in the Harden-Ben Simmons 2022 blockbuster.

Morey, however, did not use those assets to make a big swing at the February trade deadline. Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby had already been moved from the rebuilding Toronto Raptors. No desirable stars had publicly asked out, à la Kevin Durant the previous year or Harden and Simmons in 2021-22. And Embiid had just undergone knee surgery, prompting uncertainty about his status and the Sixers’ ceiling for the rest of the season.

So Morey traded for Buddy Hield, another expiring contract and potential short- and long-term fit as a three-point shooter. But that still paved the way for 11 players’ salaries to come off the books this summer.

The league’s new collective bargaining agreement has introduced new tiers — the “first apron” and “second apron” — for the highest-spending teams.

These are more than financial penalties that billionaires such as Clippers owner Steve Ballmer can shrug off, such as the luxury tax for going too far over the salary cap. The aprons come with significant roster-building restrictions, such as being prohibited to compile multiple players’ salaries in trades and draft picks becoming “frozen” and unable to be dealt.

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Now in the early stages of these new rules, teams appear unwilling to test living in that universe. In the Clippers’ official statement outlining why they were willing to let George walk, “the new CBA” is mentioned three times.

That is also why the Golden State Warriors were no longer a threat to land George once he declined his player option for the 2024-25 season. The Warriors needed him to opt in to orchestrate a trade, where Golden State would also send salary back out to the Clippers. The Warriors, who this offseason have already lost franchise legend Klay Thompson, could not realistically sign George as a free agent.

The Clippers had months to sign George to an extension. And when fellow star Kawhi Leonard agreed to a three-year, $152.4 million deal in January, the Clippers clearly hoped George would take a similar offer to keep their timelines (and salaries) aligned.

George, meanwhile, wanted a full four-year max deal. Becoming an unrestricted free agent — especially with the knowledge that the Sixers (and Orlando Magic) had the required cap space to make such an offer — provided George with leverage. Still, the Clippers were unwilling to bump their offer to that extra year.

Perhaps the Clippers overestimated how much George enjoyed playing in his hometown and close to family. Maybe they did not love the optics of George being on a more lucrative contract than Leonard, the more accomplished player when healthy. Perhaps they could not stomach George still on a max deal in his age-37 season, an understandable hesitation given the Leonard-George era fell short largely because of consistent injury issues with both players.

But the Sixers were willing to offer that fourth year. They had pivoted from Harden to a new cap-clearing path and banked on the new CBA hindering their opponents. They had one massive contract coming off the books and a rising star willing to wait for his first big payday.

And then the Sixers caught the necessary break, leading George to Philly.