Mikal Bridges’ 27-point outing for Phoenix in Game Two of the NBA Finals afforded us all one more opportunity to have a chuckle at the expense of the Sixers: Behold the team that stupidly traded a hometown hero on draft night three years ago, and received next to nothing in return.
It’s easy and amusing, and goodness knows I’ve been guilty of doing it myself. How do you trade the draft rights to a guy who was not only so obviously ascendant — a guy who improved every year he was at Villanova, while playing for two national championship teams — but whose mom, Tyneeha Rivers, at that point worked for the Sixers’ parent organization, Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment?
It looked bad then and it looks worse now, especially as Bridges, predictably, has emerged as a quintessential 3&D guy, and the perfect complement to the Chris Paul–Devin Booker–Deandre Ayton core that entering Sunday night’s Game Three has the Suns two victories from a title. It’s difficult to envision Bridges ever being an All-Star, but assuming good health, he should be productive for years to come.
Meanwhile the player the Sixers received from the Suns in return, Zhaire Smith, has flamed out. He played 13 games for Philadelphia over two seasons, then was shipped off to Detroit in November 2020. The Pistons subsequently waived him, as did the Grizzlies, and he spent this season in the G-League.
So yeah, the deal was a disaster; Brett Brown, who in addition to serving as coach was also the interim GM at the time it was consummated, has even apologized “a gazillion times” to Rivers, as she recently told 6ABC’s Jeff Skversky.
But it was also defensible.
Consider where the Sixers were at that point. Having emerged from The Process, they had two guys, Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, who they expected to be their long-term pillars. (And yes, we all know how that looks now.) They were “star-hunting,” as Brown said the night of the draft. There was talk that they would make a run at LeBron James, then a free agent, or Kawhi Leonard via trade. Neither of those moves materialized. But in February 2019 they packaged the oft-forgotten other piece in the Bridges-Smith trade, an unprotected first-round pick acquired from Phoenix, in a trade to the Clippers for Tobias Harris. (That pick, originally held by Miami, has since been dealt to Oklahoma City and will be conveyed in this year’s draft. It is the 18th overall choice.)
And again, all of this looks worse now than it did then. Were you forced in 2018 to choose between Harris and Bridges, you’d take Harris every time. Maybe not now, considering their respective postseason performances, but definitely then.
The other thing to wonder about is how Smith might have developed, had he remained healthy. He broke a foot later in the summer of 2018, then suffered an allergic reaction to something he ate, which reportedly had life-threatening consequences. So yeah, maybe don’t make Zhaire a punchline. (Again, insert mea culpa here.)
The bottom line is that this is far from the worst personnel move ever made by a franchise that in the course of its history has traded five Hall of Famers (Wilt Chamberlain, Charles Barkley, Moses Malone, Maurice Cheeks and Allen Iverson), used a second overall pick on Shawn Bradley and in one five-year stretch in the ‘60s made first-round picks of Craig Raymond, Shaler Halimon, Bud Ogden, Al Henry and Dana Lewis, who between them averaged 3.4 points a game with the team.
The other thing to keep in mind is that we’re looking at this with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Would Bridges have been a good fit on the Sixers? Of course. But presented with the circumstances they faced at the time of the trade, is the move totally out of the question? Not in the least.