Tor_Raps wrote:Haha wow... it's the truth and something the Sixers clearly screwed up.
The whole world but the people who mattered could tell you keeping Butler should have been priority number 1, Ben Simmons be damned.
Sure did, and I keep thinking about it and shaking my head.
It's important to say "Sixers" first and foremost because this was, well, a process. Many, many mistakes were made along the way and the Simmons-Embiid fit issue has loomed largest for years. No blame-assignment should be letting any decision makers off the hook.
But man, I consider Morey to have probably been a Top 3 GM of the 2010s. He did great work for Houston before the wheels came off at the end - which I don't think was reasonable to expect to avoid short of just doing an even better job as GM so the team somehow ends up the very best team in the league rather than just one of the best.
And upon his arrival in Philly, his Seth Curry move was fantastic. He's still a smart guy capable to quality vision and skilled detail work...but coming to Philly had to mean making the plausibly the right call with Simmons-Embiid, and that ship has now sailed in a way that was the furthest thing from unpredictable.
Morey decided, along with whoever else nudged him along the way, that the wisest course of action was to spend one year seeing how far Simmons-Embiid could go if he made some shrewd moves around them. Understandable why this made sense, and obviously it looked good in the regular season, but you have to have a sense that fallout like this is a realistic outcome of a playoff collapse, and the concern of playoff collapse due to the critical fit issues were always readily apparent.
We didn't know that the 76ers would fail, but we knew how the 76ers would fail if they failed. It could easily happen, and could easily become catastrophic if the stars turn on each other. It's a massive risk, and you're risking it for what? A bet that this duo with a majorly flawed weakness combination wouldn't have to face competition enough it would keep them from a title?
That bet made sense up to a point, but Morey needed to have the intellectual distance and pragmatic understanding to make the hard call and trade one of them when he arrived.
Not saying I'd fire Morey here, but he's dug himself into a hole, and were I the owner, I'd be giving him less rope at this point compared to a year ago. I have to know how he's responding to what's happening. Does he have a solid objective grasp of the entirety of the situation? How's his emotional state? Might he start managing desperately to try to "win it all back"? Oftentimes I find it's the desperate GMs who do the most damage to their employers.
