Daryl Morey: Sixers believe they can still win 2025 NBA title, Joel Embiid’s knee injury to improve over time

When he signed Paul George, re-signed Tyrese Maxey and extended Joel Embiid last offseason, Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey definitely didn’t anticipate the team being 20-30 and 11th in the Eastern Conference after the NBA trade deadline. On Friday, though, in his first press conference since the season started, Morey said that, while “this has been a disappointing year,” he still believes the Sixers can compete for the 2025 championship.

“We feel like that team has a real shot,” Morey told reporters in Philadelphia. “We’ve made our path to win harder, obviously. We’re going to have to fight to probably get into the playoffs, and then we’re going to have to fight to beat a very good team in the first round, but we feel like we would’ve had to play that team at some point to win the title anyway. And we’re just focused on [winning a] championship, and I know you have to squint a little, but we feel like this group can still do that.”

On Friday in Detroit, Embiid will play in his 15th game of the season. He returned from a 15-game absence on Tuesday and recorded a 29-point triple-double in a win against the Dallas Mavericks. Morey noted that if Embiid, George, and Maxey all finish the game against the Pistons — i.e. avoid any injuries or ejections — it will be only the eighth time that has occurred this season, and the Sixers are currently 6-1 in those games. The last time was a blowout win in Brooklyn on Jan. 4. 

“We had a plan going into this year,” Morey said, “and I think Mike Tyson said it well: Plans are really good until you get punched in the face. And we’ve really, really been punched in the face by injuries this year. We’ve lost the most star games, we’ve lost the most wins, you can measure it a whole bunch of ways.”

Morey credited Maxey and coach Nick Nurse with putting the team in a position to fight for the playoffs. “What I’m excited about with Tyrese is what he’s added this year: His defense has materially improved, both eye test and data,” Morey said. “That’s so important to us.” 

He also said Maxey has “materially added playmaking, in particular drive-and-kick.” He said he wished the team “would’ve held the fort a little better” with Embiid out, but the problem is that Embiid is far from the only Sixer who has been sidelined.

“One of the big reasons we thought we could hold the fort was [Andre] Drummond,” Morey said. “One of ’em was [George]. Both have missed significant time. I could keep going, sadly, with injuries this year. We seem to have hit snake eyes on injury.”

He continued: “Nick and the players have held it together, if you really adjust for all the guys who have been out.”

Philadelphia is 61% through the regular season. It’s one game behind the 10th-place Chicago Bulls, two and a half games behind the eighth-place Orlando Magic and five and a half games behind the sixth-place Miami Heat. Last season, when Embiid played in a total of 39 games, Philadelphia finished 47-35 and seventh in the East and qualified for the playoffs by beating Miami in a play-in game. It would have to go 17-5 the rest of the way to match last season’s record, but A) that record might be enough to finish fourth or fifth this season and B) it’s not as if avoiding the play-in is a must. The Sixers lost an extremely tight six-game series to the New York Knicks in the first round last season, but the Heat went from the play-in to the Finals the year before that.

“We still think this can be a special season,” Morey said.

‘We continue to plan to build around Joel’

Embiid’s season has had a bunch of false starts, but, according to Morey, Philadelphia hasn’t wavered in its commitment to him as a franchise player. 

“We’re building around Joel,” he said. “We’ve built around Joel. We continue to plan to build around Joel because he’s the special player that can help us win the championship.”

Morey said that Embiid is “core to everything we do.” Embiid will turn 31 in March, and he signed a three-year max extension last summer that will pay him a projected $192.9 million, assuming that he picks up the 2028-29 player option, projected to be worth $69.1 million. The franchise is not second-guessing its decision to offer him that extension or its due diligence when it came to his health, per Morey.

“No, we thought it was the right move at the time,” Morey said. “We think it’s the right move now. Again, with just NBA history coming involved here, you don’t win without one of these special players. You don’t get to add a Paul George unless he knows that they’re going to be together for [the] long term.” Morey added that medical experts told the team that Embid’s knee injury would be manageable, and he still believes that it is.

Almost exactly a year ago, Embiid had a procedure to address an injury to the lateral meniscus in his left knee. “On this injury that he had last February and he had the procedure on, it’s one that you manage symptoms,” Morey said. “And we’re optimistic long-term. Talking to the doctors, and our understanding from talking to multiple experts, I think we’re [at] seven, eight, nine, 10 at this point of the top people in the world all see this as one that, over time, will improve. But it’s happened slower than anyone’s anticipated.” 

There have been times this season, Morey said, that the medical staff and Embiid himself have thought he was “on the way towards playing,” only for swelling and/or pain to derail the plan.

“When those things happen, it’s best for him to sit out,” Morey said. “I know that Joel is doing everything he can and fighting to be out there as much as possible.”

The Sixers are “excited for this stretch run,” Morey said, because the Sixers might “finally” see their Big 3 share the court. In the short term, they know they have to “constantly manage” Embiid’s symptoms, but they anticipate that this will not always be the case.

“We do think there will be a place in the future where the symptoms and that are reduced or go to zero,” Morey said. “But we’re still in the middle of that where we have to manage it, and it’s going to be based on symptoms whether or not he’s out there. Right now, he feels like he’s in a great place and it looks like it’s in a great place.”

‘An overall, long-term better fit, both age and game’

Morey said that approaching Thursday’s trade deadline, the Sixers “wanted to accomplish three goals: get younger, get players who can help us now and into the future, and then the ability to retain them.” They ended up making three moves: trading Caleb Martin for Quentin Grimes and a 2025 second-round pick; trading Reggie Jackson and a 2026-first-round pick for Jared Butler and four second-round picks (one in 2027, one in 2028, two in 2030); and trading KJ Martin and two second-round picks (in 2027 and 2031) for cash.

Taken together, Philly effectively turned a veteran starting wing into a younger starting wing, turned a veteran backup point guard into a younger backup point guard and turned a 24-year-old backup forward into an extra roster spot. All while adding three second-round picks and getting rid of a 2026 pick that will almost certainly land in the last few picks of the first round.

The most immediately important move is getting the 24-year-old Grimes. Compared to the 31-year-old Caleb Martin, the Sixers “feel like Grimes is an overall long-term better fit, both age and game. And so we saw that opportunity to upgrade the team, so we did.”

Grimes is a career 37.7% 3-point shooter who shoots them faster and at a higher volume than Caleb Martin. As such, he demands more attention when spotting up. He’s not as adept at defending bigger players, but Philadelphia was more concerned about smaller ones.

“We love his fit with Tyrese, his ability to hit shots, his ability to be the primary defender of the guards on the perimeter,” Morey said.

The fit with Jared McCain, the likely Rookie of the Year before his season-ending meniscus injury in mid-December, is also appealing. McCain and Maxey are “definitely viable” together, Morey said, but he also acknowledged that pairing two small guards can create structural problems defensively. 

“We wanted one of our guards to be able to take the primary guard matchup,” Morey said. “We felt like Quentin could do that, both with Jared and with Tyrese going forward.”

After an offseason in which Philadelphia signed Drummond (who is 31 years old), Jackson (who is 34), Eric Gordon (36) and Kyle Lowry (38), “we were a little bit on the older side with a lot of the acquisitions of our role players,” Morey said. The Sixers had see Butler as “someone who can really help us down the road as well,” and they’ve had their eyes on him “for quite some time.”

In a vacuum, the KJ Martin salary dump is an L for Philly. The front office signed him to a two-year, $16 million contract with a non-guaranteed second season in part because it would have the ability to flip him for a higher-salaried player than it would otherwise be able to acquire at the deadline. Instead of doing that, it paid the Pistons to take him. This allowed the Sixers to get out of the luxury tax.

“We were sort of looking at a holistic plan of both getting younger, getting players we think are ones that can help us now and into the future and also create flexibility to keep the key players on this team going forward,” Morey said. “And we prioritized that over what KJ, CBA-wise, was able to do from a trade perspective to upgrade the team now.”

‘We feel very good about retaining Yabu’

If Morey had one main message on Friday, it was that the front office remains confident in the structure of the team it built last summer. The secondary message was that the trade deadline was about putting the proper pieces around the core this season and beyond. Some of them are already on the roster. Even though Philadelphia’s record has been rough this season, it has found helpful role players in Guerschon Yabusele and Justin Edwards. 

“We think that having three elite players like Paul, Joel and Tyrese is the way to go because we see our job as finding the Yabus, finding the Justins,” Morey said. “Those things, you can find. You can’t find Paul Georges, you can’t find Joel Embiids and you can’t find Tyrese Maxeys. What you can do is have a front office and a coaching staff that works tirelessly to find these guys who can then fit around it.”

Yabusele will hit free agency in July, and it’s unclear if the Sixers will be in a position to re-sign him. They do not have his Bird Rights since they gave him a one-year minimum deal last offseason. They may, however, be able to bring him back using the non-taxpayer midlevel exception, depending on what other moves they make.

“I don’t think you can ever be confident on an unrestricted free agent, but we feel very good,” Morey said. “He loves it here. We love him. We just freed up more — with Caleb’s contract going out, we freed up more room in the future, so we feel very good about retaining Yabu.”

Although Caleb Martin’s contract is no longer on Philly’s books, it technically freed up more room. But Grimes’ cap hold next summer ($12.9 million) is more than $3 million more than Martin’s salary would have been, and Grimes’ first-year salary on a new deal might be higher than that. Asked directly about staying under the first apron next season so it can use that non-taxpayer midlevel on Yabusele, Morey said: “I think that’s something we just have to map out. I haven’t thought about that one as much. But the reality is we knew prior to the deadline we had less ability to retain and post we have more ability to retain.”

That last point is debatable, given that KJ Martin’s contract could have been cleared by waiving him at the end of the season and acquiring Grimes, which suggests that Philadelphia would like to retain him. Generally speaking, though, Morey has a long track record of making creative moves with little wiggle room. Even if the Sixers didn’t necessarily solve the Yabusele problem this week, they can figure it out a few months from now.