The Philadelphia 76ers traded second-year guard Jared McCain, who was an early NBA Rookie of the Year candidate last season and had made 15-of-26 attempts from 3 in his past six games, on Wednesday.
On Friday, less than 24 hours removed from the NBA trade deadline and a road loss to the Los Angeles Lakers, in which the Sixers shot 5-of-24 from deep, president of basketball operations Daryl Morey admitted Philadelphia sent McCain to the Oklahoma City Thunder in hopes of making an additional deadline deal.
Advertisement
But, as Morey repeated throughout his news conference, “nothing materialized.”
“Because we’re playing well, we were trying to upgrade the team and add to the team now,” Morey told reporters. “That was goal No. 1.”
Before their setback in L.A., the Sixers were riding a five-game win streak. They’re still sixth in the Eastern Conference standings. Philadelphia is without veteran forward Paul George until late March because of his 25-game suspension, however, Morey maintains the Sixers are in the mix among the top teams in the East. They haven’t made it past the conference semifinals since the 2000-01 season, when they lost to the Lakers in the NBA Finals.
Morey, who has been the team’s president of basketball operations since November 2020, explained Friday that the Sixers made the McCain move a day before the deadline so that they’d have assets to use as bargaining chips for a trade that could help them move the needle.
Advertisement
While the defending NBA champion Thunder got the former Duke standout, the Sixers collected four picks: a 2026 Houston Rockets first-round pick and three future second-round picks.
“We were trying to reuse those draft picks to add now,” Morey said. “We do feel like this deal sets up better in the future, but we understand that we were looking to add now, and nothing materialized.”
McCain, 21, averaged 15.3 points, 2.6 assists and 2.4 rebounds in his first 23 games with the Sixers, except he missed the remainder of the 2024-25 campaign with a lateral meniscus tear in his left knee.
Advertisement
Then, this past September, McCain sustained a UCL tear in his right thumb during a workout a day before the team’s media day.
In 37 games with the Sixers this time around, he was playing just 16.8 minutes per contest. He was overshadowed by the emergence of rookie guard VJ Edgecombe, whom Philadelphia selected No. 3 overall in last year’s draft, and the play of two-time All-Star Tyrese Maxey and Quentin Grimes.
Still, McCain was providing valuable perimeter shooting off the bench on a squad hungry for a postseason run after missing out on the playoffs last season for the first time in eight seasons.
[Get more Sixers news: Philly team feed]
Morey said he’s “quite confident” that the Sixers were selling high in trading McCain this week.
Advertisement
“We see Jared as someone who is more likely to help a team in the future,” he said. “I think that’s fairly obvious. I think that he has a bright future. We thought that the draft picks we got will help us more in the future and could have helped us this deadline.”
Morey said that Philadelphia offered the picks it received in the McCain trade to “many teams,” and, yet, it couldn’t land a player it deemed worthy of that kind of transaction.
“But we feel like, going forward, those picks will help us build the team in the future in a good way,” he emphasized.
While Morey likes the potential of the 2026 NBA Draft, he’s not married to using the Rockets’ first-round pick the Sixers gained in the McCain trade.
Advertisement
That pick, as well as the three second-rounders, could be used for moves around the draft, Morey noted.
On one hand, sending McCain to Oklahoma City put Philadelphia under the luxury tax, allowing the Sixers to convert two-way player Dom Barlow, a fourth-year forward who is averaging 8.5 points and 5.0 rebounds per game.
On the other hand, the Sixers ducking the tax again has raised questions about the franchise’s willingness to spend for a championship-caliber roster.
“I understand the perception, and I hope to defeat it by finding a deal that, you know, I can go to ownership and say we think this move is the right move to do for that and create the apron issues that it would create,” Morey said. “But I haven’t been able to recommend that move yet.”
Leave a Reply