tigerae wrote:HotelVitale wrote:tigerae wrote:The Sixers front office obviously has some big issues if players keep wanting out. Jimmy Butler, Ben Simmons, now Harden. I can almost understand any one of these players being difficult , but because it keeps happening over and over again I'm thinking it may not be the players after all.
See why you might think that but it's a pretty superficial read of the situation. First those things happened under different coaches and GMs/FOs, and second those things all happened for obvious individual reasons. Butler didn't want out--he just wasn't offered a full max by a stupid FO--and then Simmons quit on the team because of the well-known Simmons nonsense. Then Harden wanted out because he kept sucking at make-or-break PO moments and Morey wouldn't give him a long contract two years in a row.
Definitely lots of mistakes made along the way, but two of those three things were just contract disputes and the third was one of the weirdest personality things in NBA history. I'd say the problem has been that the plan keeps shifting, and the team hasn't had a clear core they're rocking with. Leaves things more open to ruptures that with most good teams.
https://youtu.be/NP5_CKXdvjQThe video of Butler saying "Tobias Harris over me" says they didn't handle it properly. Jimmy didn't want out initially, but that changed when the team didn't give him the max he wanted. Similar with Harden, he initially took less money so they can sign players like Tucker and House with the promise of getting the max in the future. Since they didn't give him the max after he took less to help the team, he now wants out.
Simmons is a wild card and I guess we will see which Simmons comes to play this season with the Nets now that he's 100%. To me it looked like the team as a whole gave up on him and took away his confidence. He also had psychological issues and injuries, but they just gave up on him.
Maybe different coaching staff and different parts of the FO, but the owner and some of his guys could be in the background calling some of the shots. This is from someone looking from the outside, so I don't know the inner workings of the team but the Butler and Harden situations are extremely similar. They were promised money and then weren't offered that money. Simmons could be a wild card, but imo the team didn't handle that properly either.
It's possible that ownership is behind the Harden thing but the other things are just their own situations--three very different situations that involved different people on both sides. An old and very bad FO led by Brett Brown made a ridiculously awful decision to max Tobias Harris and not Butler, and that was 100% on that FO. (They could've easily signed both too). Then Simmons quit on the team after being embarrassing himself in the ATL series (and then getting relentlessly mocked by the media); even if you blame the one little comment from Doc Rivers saying 'I don't know the answer to that and I'm not going to talk about it' when asked about Simmons' play, cool that's on Doc Rivers. But he wasn't the coach during Butler's time and isn't the coach now. (Doc also spent years mindlessly backing up Simmons and saying how awesome he was, so you'd have to have a really really low opinion of Simmons to think he needed to shatter to pieces the first time the coach said something that wasn't 100% supportive).
And the assumption that Harden was 'promised' a huge deal is a really bad one, given that absolutely no one was talking about a deal longer than 3 years in 2022 (remember Harden was terrible in the 2022 PO and looked much worse than he did this past season). It's a big stretch to think a capped-out team would've promised an aging player coming off a very weak season a 5-year max that started when he was 34. I won't go into that much here but even if you want believe some version of that, that would be on Daryl Morey.
I don't mind criticizing the Sixers all day, most Sixers fans don't. Morey's arrogant and Rivers was thick, ownership seems a little clownish too. But it sounds like you have to create caricatures of these situations--Simmons being bullied, Harden being baldly lied to--to make them part of some team-wide shakiness. And if those things were true it would mean a very, very dysfunctional team. Outside of those things, you really don't hear a whole lot weird or bad about the Sixers' current internal organization. Most players and staff seem to have a good if boring experience with it.
