The Philadelphia 76ers are in the process of picking up the pieces following another Round 2 exit which led to the firing of Doc Rivers after three seasons as the team’s coach.
The move caught Joel Embiid off guard a bit as President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey admitted that the MVP of the league was a bit shocked when he heard the news. Embiid did endorse Rivers for the job he had done after the Game 7 loss to the Boston Celtics.
With the suspicion that James Harden had something to do with Rivers’ dismissal after The Beard described his relationship with Rivers as just “OK”, ESPN’s Alan Hahn questions which star the Sixers are committed to.
Hahn said Thursday morning on “First Take”:
Mike D’Antoni’s still out there as we know. I mean, that’s all part of the Houston setup that they have with James Harden and Daryl Morey. So there’s options that you could go to and you can feel pretty good about to make that change. You can’t really move on from James Harden and replace his production and say, well, we’ll be fine. We’ll stay championship contending teams if we let him walk because you don’t really have the ability to go out and get somebody of that level. Can you get Damian Lillard? Well, he’s not technically—he’s not available. So you don’t know if you can get him who else in the league? Are you gonna get Kyrie (Irving)? Like who you getting? A Chris Paul? So there’s a lot of questions that you have to ask about that and you had to make a decision between one or the other because clearly they weren’t going to coexist and so the easy move was to move on from Doc Rivers, but the fact that they didn’t talk to Joel Embiid before making this decision, and did it after, that is alarming to me, because that kind of suggests—that leads me to wonder, are you changing how you feel about Joel Embiid? Does that kind of give me a peek behind the curtain of how you really feel about an MVP? Who was supposed to be your franchise player, your franchise player you probably will go to and ask them. What do you think? Or we want to do this. How would you react to this? They didn’t do any of that. All Daryl Morey said was, we’ve got to convince him whoever we hire next is the right move. There’s no convincing that. Once you already told the franchise player that we’re gonna do a move without you involved in it, you just told the franchise player, you’re not our franchise player.
This will be an interesting summer for the Sixers. Morey did add that he has scenarios lined up in the case Harden leaves this summer. Obviously, scenario A is bringing back The Beard. He had one helluva season despite the awful playoff performances to end the season.
However, they have to get the hire right. The new coach will have to make sure both Harden and Embiid are involved and are in the right spots to succeed.
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