July 20, 2026
Kevin Barrett/for PhillyVoice
Mike Gansey's first several weeks as Sixers President of Basketball Operations have certainly been eventful.
Will this week be the week?
As we kick off another week with 5 Sixers thoughts, LeBron James is still a free agent. The Sixers are one of the remaining contenders to sign the NBA's all-time leading scorer, but they face formidable competition.
As best as anybody can tell, the Sixers and their fellow teams courting James are in the dark as far as where the 41-year-old is leaning. All they can do is wait.
In the meantime, let's evaluate where the Sixers' future trade capabilities stand in the wake of their blockbuster deal with the Boston Celtics for Jaylen Brown and further dissect the team's signing of Dean Wade to a four-year contract before capping things off by checking in on James:
When the Sixers traded Paul George, two first-round picks (one of which includes a complicated condition which could turn it into a swap) and two second-round picks for Jaylen Brown, they did not just bet on Brown being more valuable than everything they gave up and Joel Embiid being healthy enough for that to matter. They also significantly limited their future maneuverability when it comes to trading first-round picks.
The NBA's famous "Stepien Rule," which prevents teams from being without a first-round pick in consecutive future drafts, now comes into play for the Sixers in a major way.
Because the Sixers could be without a first-rounder in 2028 (barring the results of the aforementioned complex condition), they cannot trade their 2027 or 2029 first-round picks. And because the Sixers are without a first-rounder in 2031, they cannot trade their 2030 or 2032 first-round picks.
There is a world in which the Sixers find a way to trade a piece of that 2028 first-rounder tied to the Celtics and Los Angeles Clippers, but it would likely not carry significant value given that the upside has been distributed to Boston already and it could end up not conveying as a first-round pick altogether.
That means the Sixers suddenly only have one first-rounder tradable at face value: their 2033 first-round pick.
MORE: Sixers future draft pick tracker
In what has been a busy debut summer, Sixers President of Basketball Operations Mike Gansey targeted Wade as he looked to upgrade from Kelly Oubre Jr. and Quentin Grimes. Wade is a player Gansey knows extremely well; the Sixers' new shot-caller is credited with discovering Wade and kickstarting his rise from two-way signing to NBA starter.
Wade is a limited player; he has never averaged more than 6.0 points or 4.9 shot attempts per game. That did not dissuade Gansey from making a run at the 29-year-old, in part because the Sixers are not signing Wade to create offense. They are signing him to fit around their star players by defending across the positional spectrum and shooting spot-up threes.
Oftentimes, Sixers role players have been judged through the lens of how they fit around the team's best players – with the added caveat: "when the stars are healthy."
Perhaps the strongest case against giving Wade the four-year, $38.7 million deal the Sixers did would be that he is not exactly an iron man himself. Wade has only reached the 60-game mark once in his seven NBA seasons:
| Season | Dean Wade games played |
| 2019-20 | 12 |
| 2020-21 | 63 |
| 2021-22 | 51 |
| 2022-23 | 44 |
| 2023-24 | 54 |
| 2024-25 | 59 |
| 2025-26 | 59 |
A few things worth noting: Wade was a two-way player as a rookie, so he could not be active more than 50 times that season. As an unproven sophomore the following season, he was available all season but was not a full-season rotation piece. Every year of his career since then has included a lengthy absence of some sort, including what seemed to be several ankle and knee ailments. Last season, Wade missed a decent chunk of the end of the regular season due to an ankle injury suffered during pregame warmups.
When he is uniform, Wade's versatility will give Sixers head coach Nick Nurse some much-needed optionality as he builds out lineups and substitution patterns. But in addition to being a clear injury risk, Wade is already entering a situation in which he will be asked to log many more minutes than he ever has.
Wade is coming off a season in which his 22.3 minutes per game marked a career-high. He has played 6,832 total minutes across his seven years in the NBA, while Oubre gave the Sixers 5,707 minutes in a three-year stint. That is a marked difference when it comes to reliability and availability.
The thought above might make the Wade signing sound a lot riskier, particularly given its four-year term and the fact that it could be the Sixers' last time shopping in that expensive of a free-agency aisle for a few years. But, in addition to all of the basketball reasons why Wade is a sensible fit on this team, this deal really does not come with much downside:
| Season | Salary |
| 2026-27 | $9,000,000 |
| 2027-28 | $9,450,000 |
| 2028-29 | $9,900,000 |
| 2029-30 | $10,350,000 ($1,650,000 guaranteed) |
| Total | $38,700,000 ($30,000,000 guaranteed) |
Should the first three years of Wade's contract not go as planned, the Sixers can easily waive him with little to no cost and get out of that fourth season (they could even waive and stretch him after two years if things went poorly, but they would incur a dead cap hit of $1,650,000 in each of the following seven years).
The likeliest scenario should Wade struggle, either on the court or with his health: the Sixers use his salary as useful filler in a deal. Wade's contract is not small, but as the NBA's salary cap continues to increase his deal will be more and more negligible to other teams if the Sixers need to make money match.
MORE: Dean Wade film study
In his press conference earlier this month explaining Boston's side of the Brown-for-George trade, Celtics President of Basketball Operations Brad Stevens mentioned that the Sixers and Celtics have two preseason games lined up in October.
That means Brown and George will see a whole lot of their former teammates in 2026-27, with at least six matchups between the Sixers and Celtics on the docket.
Shortly after the publication of this story, the Celtics announced their 2026 preseason schedule, which confirms that the Sixers will head to Boston for an exhibition on Oct. 10 and play host to their rivals for another on Oct. 16.
James appears to be in the home stretch of his free agency. Late last week, he had a string of public appearances, and every word or phrase he uttered was taken as a hint of some kind.
At a live recording of "The Shop," James spoke about wanting to join a team that "practices championship habits every day, but trusting the process more than anything." As soon as those three words came out of his mouth, the crowd went into hysterics, thinking he was teasing a deal with the Sixers:
As LeBron James rattles off what he will value in his next team, he used the phrase “trust the process” and the crowd was sent into a tizzy, thinking he was giving a clue about the Philadelphia 76ers. pic.twitter.com/klpBWePWNq
— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) July 17, 2026
James clarified that he was not trying to signal an alliance with Joel Embiid.
"I've been saying 'trust the process' since I was drafted in, like, 2003," James said. "I don't even know if Embiid was even born yet."
Embiid, for the record, was born in 1994.
MORE: Will Brown stunt VJ Edgecombe's development?
