Philly Front Office

Sixers Sliding Doors: No Draft Pick

Sixers Sliding Doors: Picking 3-6

When it comes to the 2025 NBA Draft, two players stand above the rest: Cooper Flagg and Dylan Harper. The reason those two are in their own tier is that they have the talent to be the alpha of a franchise. In the top two spots there is no talk of trades. At #1, you are adding Cooper Flagg. At #2, you are adding Dylan Harper. End of story. Even the Sixers, who have too many questions and not enough solutions, will have one less decision to make if they land one of the top two spots in the lottery. As with all of these hypotheticals, we’ll see what these selections will look like depending on whether Joel Embiid plays or not.

Before we start, it is important to know some numbers:

• Salary Cap: $154.5m
• Luxury Tax Threshold: $187.9m
• First Apron: $195.9m
• Second Apron: $207.8m
• Embiid, George, Maxey, and McCain combined: $149m.
• Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception: $14.1m – only if you are over the cap but under the tax line
• Taxpayer MLE: $5.7m – only if you are over the tax line
• Biannual Exception: around $5m
• Empty roster spot: $1m
• #1 pick: around $13.8m
• #2 pick: around $12.4m

With the number 2 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, the Philadelphia 76ers select…Dylan Harper!

Harper is a 6’6″ 215 pound guard who can shoot, pass, and defend well enough to play either back court position. For the most part though, he needs the ball in his hands. This makes his fit in Philly rather tricky.

In a world with a healthy Embiid, the addition of Harper would help stabilize a potentially very small back court of Tyrese Maxey, Jared McCain, and Quentin Grimes. Due to his large size, he could pick up ball handling duties with any of them and defend larger guards. You would feel comfortable running a two-man game with any combination.

During particular matchups, you could even run Harper out there as a 3 on defense with Embiid, George, Maxey, and McCain. In theory, you can’t have too much ball handling, but his defense would have to be pretty solid to make this work. More than likely he would be in a heavy guard rotation that would limit the minutes of the Sixers 3 best players after a healthy Embiid. You can see how this would be a problem in year 2.

Anyway, the team would have Embiid, George, Maxey, McCain, Harper, Justin Edwards, Adem Bona, and Andre Drummond (audible groan), as roster locks. The Big 4 plus Harper would be a total of $161m. Drummond is getting $5m unless he’s traded; $166m. Edwards and Bona make about $4m total; $170m. Oubre could opt in to his contract for around $10m but he probably won’t. We could offer him a new contract at around $14m, which he would probably take; $184m. With empty roster spots, this takes us to the tax line which means we lose the higher mid-level exception. The Sixers have non-Bird Rights for Yabusele meaning the only way they could use that exception on him is to sign him to a maximum $3.3m salary. Instead, they could use the tax payer mid-level of $5.7m. If that’s good enough for the Dancing Bear, then great; $192m. That brings us to Grimes. His qualifying offer is around $9m. Great, that keeps us below the second apron! Not so fast. This would be the perfect scenario for the Nets to offer him around $22m per season (or more) and force the Sixers to either drop him or go over the second apron. This would also prevent us from actually using that mid level exception and signing Yabu. The idea of Grimes coming back really took a hit when Drummond indicated that he would return. Hopefully Jonathan Kuminga is the Nets target.

What if Embiid is toast? No Embiid means the team will be dealing with a black hole of a contract for 4 years. This would be a much better situation for Harper because he gets the keys. He would fit very well with Maxey in the backcourt, but probably even better with just McCain. Trade Maxey. Having a young, controllable, and developing backcourt of Harper and McCain and a ton of extra draft picks really helps adrenalize a rebuild. Since the Sixers best resources would be other team’s picks, there would be no reason to tank any further and they could fill the rest of the team with solid role players to really let their backcourt develop.

With the number 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, the Philadelphia 76ers select…Cooper Flagg!

Flagg fits in perfect regardless of the Embiid situation. He is a 6’9″ competitive power forward who can do pretty much everything including shoot, handle, rebound, and play defense. He will 100% be the top pick in the draft.

If the Sixers have a healthy Embiid, we have a similar financial situation to above, just about $1m less to spend. However, with Flagg, the need for Yabusele and Oubre (and Paul George for that matter) decreases significantly. The Sixers would have the luxury of probably ditching Yabusele and having Oubre and Grimes (hopefully) come off the bench. The starting lineup would be Embiid, Flagg, George, Maxey, and McCain. That’s a 5 shooter lineup. Maybe they want to have Grimes start over McCain? Then you go 5 out with shooters and solid defense. That’s a conteder lineup (I know, but let me excited for once).

No Embiid isn’t half bad either. In that situation, they can still hang on to Maxey and have him develop chemistry with Flagg. The lineup is still decently balanced with Bona playing the Maluach, rim running center position with Flagg and an incredibly small lineup of 3 out of 4 of George, Grimes, Maxey and McCain. George would be traded anyway. Who knows, maybe even Embiid would see this kind of transcendent talent and learn to be a late stage Tim Duncan. A guy can dream right?

In the End

Everything comes down to Embiid as always, but with these two the thought of rebuilding isn’t a barren hellscape. They are blue chip type players, the kind of stars you hope for in the lottery. With them, a rebuild wouldn’t be nearly as painful because the hard part would be over. The lottery is on May 12.