Through gritted teeth, we waited. The Philadelphia 76ers had too many lines in the ocean during free agency's opening day not to catch SOMETHING, it was just a matter of who and for how much. Indeed, we get our first bite earlier this afternoon: Jerryd Bayless, veteran point guard, would be joining our Fair Sixers for the price of $27 million over three years. And after months of wondering what the first post-draft domino to fall would be for the Colangelo-led Ballers, the collective response to this opening salvo was as thundering as it was unanimous:
Could be worse.
Could be much worse, in fact, as evidenced by the surreal, cap-boom-inflated activity around the rest of the NBA since the calendar turned to July. The Lakers gave Timofey Mozgov, a soon-to-be-30-year-old center who barely played for the Cavs in the playoffs this year, $64 million over four years to man the middle for them. The Magic handed out four years and $29 million to DJ Augustin, a backup point guard who's already played for seven teams and only produced at replacement-level for three of them. And of course, the Blazers gave our favorite weirdo Evan Turner a staggering $70 million — that's a seven with seven zeroes in front of it, for a dude who was lucky to get paid more than the minimum two summers ago — for the next four years of his basketball life. By contrast, $27 mil for three years seems reasonable almost no matter who you're getting.
And in Bayless, the Sixers are getting a player. Not an All-Star by any means — the PG was taken with the 11th pick by the Blazers (via the Pacers) eight years ago, and since then, he's had about the career a No. 11 pick should have: A steady contributor, but never a core piece. Like the aforementioned Augustin, he's bounced around a lot, making six stops in eight seasons, and he's mostly played as a backup and emergency starter — performing adequately when pressed into starters' duty, but rarely exemplary enough to threaten anyone's job.
Still, he's not Kendall Marshall: He's been a real factor for some good teams, including the Memphis Grizzlies squad that made the conference finals four seasons ago, and the surprise Bucks playoff team of last year — for whom he even hit a game-winner against the Bulls in Round One. He's tough as nails, an improving shooter (44% from deep last year), a good athlete, and a decent-enough ball-handler and distributor, though no one will ever confuse him for Chris Paul: 6.4 assists per 36 minutes is his career-best rate.
The knock on Bayless, aside from the fact that he's not obviously great at any one thing, is that he's a lousy defender — which, considering we're still on pace to enter the season with Nik Stauskas as our two-guard, could be a real problem. Hopefully the team's defensive identity re-emerges with (please please please) Joel Embiid and Nerlens Noel manning the middle instead of Jahlil Okafor, but there are gonna be games where Bayless' sloppiness drives Brett Brown a little nuts.
That's OK, though: No one's asking Jerryd to be our long-term solution at the point. All he has to do the next few seasons is share ball-handling responsibilities with Ben Simmons, hit open shots when Simmons and whoever else of our big men are still around go to work underneath, and not do anything to actively poison the franchise. He's a placeholder PG — the competent veteran placeholder we've so desperately lacked over the last year-and-a-half of Ish Smith, T.J. McConnell, Tony Wroten, Isaiah Canaan, and Kendall Marshall. He doesn't need to do that much to justify the $27 million investment.
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So yeah, the Sixers could do a lot worse. And sadly, the Sixers still may do a lot worse: They remain sitting on untold oodles of disposable cash and an imperative from no one in particular to spend it. Reports even have the Colangelos begging human patience test Dion Waiters for a sit-down, competing with the Kings for the privilege. (Pro tip: When your brilliant free-agency play is the same as the Kings', it's definitely not as brilliant as you think it is.) But for now, we can only judge Brian and Jerry for the moves they've actually made, and on that front, so far, so pleased. Bring on the franchise seat-filler.
