As the season winds down, questions are going to loom about the futures of Daryl Morey and Nick Nurse. After all, a season that fails to meet expectations by this degree would naturally invite questions about any team’s leadership.
We don’t really know how hot the seats are for either guy since Josh Harris and the rest of ownership hasn’t said much about their statuses. Fans could infer that both are safe due to the fact that they’ve made it this far to begin with and have not been dismissed. Morey got to turn a lot of the roster over midseason which would also be an indicator that he’s going to get a chance to fix this. He also has a strong draft record while running the [Sixers](https://www.libertyballers.com) which would suggest he’s the best guy they could employ to make a potential top-six pick in the first round and a guaranteed early second-round pick.
Most of all, there is the amount of money owed to each person. Nurse’s contract term was not disclosed at the time he was hired but he is currently one of the 10 highest-paid head coaches in the NBA. Morey received an extension in December of 2023, early in Nurse’s first season in Philly. ESPN reported at the time that the extension runs through 2027-28 which “aligns Morey contractually” with Nurse. Therefore, the Sixers would be eating three years on both contracts if they cleaned house. Does that sound like something an ownership group that makes moves to duck the luxury tax at the trade deadline would do?
Not that Morey and Nurse deserve a free pass for this season’s disaster, but at a certain point, the Sixers need to commit to stabilizing their front office. There were multiple iterations of the front office before Morey’s arrival. If Morey stayed on and Nurse was fired, Morey would be hiring his third coach in six seasons. If Nurse stayed on and Morey would be fired, Nurse would be viewed as a lame-duck coach with a new President of Basketball Operations waiting to hire his own guy whenever ownership gave him the green light.
Therefore, we’re going to move forward under the assumption that both guys are returning, but wanted to address the statuses of each before assigning blame for this season’s disaster.
### **Daryl Morey: 35% of the blame**
We’re going to go from highest percentage of blame to lowest percentage of blame here. So yes, 35% might not be high enough for Morey, but when you have the season the Sixers have had, everyone is contributing in a negative fashion. The blame game sort of takes on a domino effect in which one person’s mistakes cause someone else to also make mistakes. The next thing you know, everyone’s making mistakes and the season is completely off the rails. That brings us to Morey as the individual most responsible for the organization’s failures over the last 9-10 months.
Last summer was viewed as the offseason Morey was targeting to shape the roster the way he wanted to. The baggage of bad contracts to players like Al Horford and Tobias Harris were no more. Toxic relationships like the ones Morey had to navigate with Ben Simmons and James Harden were over. The Sixers had cap space and draft picks to build the roster in a variety of different ways around Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. The path they choose could not have gone worse.
The marquee acquisition for Morey last summer was the signing of Paul George to a four-year contract worth nearly $212 million. George spent the season injured and failing to perform up to the level he was playing at even last year with the Clippers. It’s looking like Morey paid for past performance and not future production and getting off George’s contract will be no easy task this coming summer and beyond.
Morey also trusted a collection of washed veterans to fill out the rotation. Players like Andre Drummond, Reggie Jackson, Kyle Lowry and Eric Gordon were clearly bad investments. All of these mistakes allowed Morey’s wins like drafting Jared McCain, signing Guerschon Yabusele and trading for Quentin Grimes to be largely irrelevant. Probably the only “good” veteran signing Morey made was bringing in Caleb Martin who was sent out in the Grimes trade because the season had gone so poorly that moving off of the final three years of Martin’s contract for a younger player in Grimes was a no-brainer by the deadline.
### **Players: 30% of the blame**
If we’re going to render that strongest condemnation towards the executive who put this roster together, we have to have the players he acquired take the second-highest percentage of blame for this season.
George was viewed as the top player available in last summer’s free agent class. You can disagree with the decision to give George a four-year max contract, but that’s likely what it took in order to get him out of his hometown of Los Angeles and make the cross-country move. Also, there was probably a version of George that was below the All-Star caliber player the Sixers thought they were getting but above what we saw this year and it would have been nice to have at least gotten that player this season.
That’s where George’s underperformance falls squarely on George himself. After all, we’re talking about someone who decided to publicly state that he was going to “lock in” on the rest of the season when the season was already lost. That would suggest that George was doing too much podcasting and not enough basketballing during most of the season. In other words, he simply wasn’t committed enough to the team that made a large monetary commitment to him. This portion of blame could almost be completely assigned to George but we will mention some other players.
This is also where you can blame Embiid over any mishandling of his knee recovery that you believe to be his fault. Many people believe he should not have played in last summer’s Olympics. You would think no one would know Embiid’s knee better than Embiid himself and even though the plan was to have Embiid play fewer regular season games this season, the plan certainly wasn’t for Embiid to appear in only 19 games and look like a shell of himself in those 19 outings. Of course, Morey and the entire front office were likely involved in devising this failed plan for Embiid in 2024-25, but Embiid could have intervened if he didn’t think it would work.
It’s hard to come down too strongly on all the veterans who just aren’t very good anymore and have seen their better days come and go. Having said that, for Drummond to look as bad as he looked at 31 is a pretty damning reality for the journeyman backup center. At the end of the day, inadequate depth was a big Morey problem this season, but could have been saved if George was the player he was with the Clippers or if Embiid was more available.
### **Bad Luck: 20% of the blame**
It’s simply impossible to chalk up a season as poorly as this one has gone for Philadelphia to bad luck as the primary problem. But the Sixers certainly did not catch many breaks this season. The injury bug was ruthless and unrelenting towards Philly all season long. I don’t know that George’s season would have been drastically different if he didn’t suffer a hyperextended knee in the preseason, but he certainly didn’t get off on the right foot and he never seemed to recover.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but who could have seen Embiid performing so poorly and only playing in 19 games? After all, he had a 50-point outing in the playoffs last season against the [Knicks](https://www.postingandtoasting.com) AFTER suffering the knee injury in Jan. 2024 in a game against the Warriors. There was probably some version of Embiid that still wasn’t 100% healthy but was more effective than what he showed on the court this year that the Sixers never got.
When you toss in Jared McCain’s injury early in the season and Tyrese Maxey’s injury late in the season, the Sixers really never had a chance this year. Players like Grimes and Justin Edwards appear to be nice finds but their overachievements weren’t going to save the Sixers from the slew of injuries they suffered.
### **Nick Nurse: 15% of the blame**
We’ll round things out with the coach. The Sixers set an NBA record this week in New York when they used their 52nd different lineup combination in 2024-25. I think a lot of coaches would have struggled to win games with so many players unavailable each night. This is also why Morey belongs at the top of the list here. He devised a roster that was top-heavy and reliant on the production of the stars. When that production was either subpar or just not available, Nurse was left having to pivot in a thousand different directions, and none of them offered consistency.
If you’re a poker player, you know that sometimes you get cards that should be folded right away. In poker, you can do that and wait until the next hand. Nurse was getting foldable hands on a nightly basis with the lineups he had to trot out and this wasn’t a video game where he could just simulate the game and have the loss appear on the scoreboard.
One could argue it is the job of the coach to figure out the best collection of talent to deploy on a given night and the more shuffling the coach is doing, the more uncertain he is of what that best collection is. By definition, that’s a fair critique of the job of a head coach. But, given the situation for the Sixers this season and their top-six protected draft pick, it’s probably a good thing Nurse couldn’t find any lineup stability. If any of these players developed enough chemistry to win some more games, it would certainly not have turned the season around but it would have definitely harmed Philadelphia’s lottery odds.
The biggest criticism of Nurse shouldn’t be his inability to develop a consistent rotation but that the team got blown out in embarrassing fashion on a few occasions that really highlighted how bad things got this season and a testament to the team’s lack of effort for their coach. The home game against Chicago is probably the most glaring demolition. In general, they’ve been a terrible defensive team this season and defense is often an effort-based skill. Therefore, not defending well looks bad on any coach.
But as we stated, we’re still talking about just a few games in which the Sixers got blown out this year and they have been competitive in a lot of their losses this year.
### **Conclusion**
Morey’s atrocious offseason enabled this entire season to take place. But, with it unlikely that Morey or Nurse is fired, Sixers fans are left to hope that Morey learned from his mistakes and he can bounce back with a strong 2025 offseason. It’s a better bet than yet another power structure coming in.