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Tim BontempsApr 13, 2025, 06:43 PM ET
- Tim Bontemps is a senior NBA writer for ESPN.com who covers the league and what’s impacting it on and off the court, including trade deadline intel, expansion and his MVP Straw Polls. You can find Tim alongside Brian Windhorst and Tim MacMahon on The Hoop Collective podcast.
PHILADELPHIA — After the Philadelphia 76ers concluded their disastrous, injury-riddled 2024-25 season with a 122-102 loss to the Chicago Bulls on Sunday, president of basketball operations Daryl Morey said he and coach Nick Nurse would be back next season and “assess everything” in an effort to avoid it happening again.
“Obviously a tough season … not where we expected to be,” Morey said in his end-of-season news conference, conducted alongside Nurse about 90 minutes after Philadelphia’s loss at Wells Fargo Center.
“We expect more. We really feel for the fans who put their heart and soul into this team, and we know we’ve let you down,” Morey said. “Ownership gave us the resources to make aggressive moves this offseason to put a championship roster around Joel [Embiid] and Tyrese [Maxey] and sometimes those aggressive moves don’t initially work out, but we feel good about [them].”
Not surprisingly, after a season that ended with Philadelphia sporting one of the league’s worst records (24-58) with a roster that began with the belief and expectation of competing for a championship, the news conference was filled with explanations for why the season went the way it did, as well as lessons learned.
76ers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey, right, in announcing that he and coach Nick Nurse, left, will return next season, said, “We expect more. We really feel for the fans who put their heart and soul into this team …” Kyle Ross-Imagn Images
The biggest one, of course, was injuries, which limited Embiid — who underwent arthroscopic surgery on his left knee at NYU Langone Sports Medicine Center on Friday — to only 19 games, Paul George to 41 and Maxey to 52. The three stars shared the court in only 15 games and for less than 300 minutes overall.
Still, Morey expressed optimism about the health of all three players, insisting all would be “100%” next season. That included Embiid, who has been dealing with nagging issues with his knee for over a year now.
“This has been a very complex situation for Joel, for our medical staff, for outside folks like Dr. Glashow and others, figuring out exactly the right next step to make sure we can put him in the best way to help our team win a championship,” Morey said. “It is not straightforward, and that’s why you do get different reports, because it’s one where you do need to gather a lot of data and a lot of opinions and then make the right choice, and we feel good about the choice.”
Though Morey is optimistic about the health of his stars moving forward, he readily acknowledged he made mistakes last summer in his team-building strategy. Morey he said was focused on the playoffs in going after veteran, experienced players last summer, but it took his mind off the rigors of an 82-game regular season.
Both Morey and Nurse said with teams now putting a larger emphasis on offensive rebounding and the amount of energy and effort needed for high-level defense on top players, it has made building a roster to survive the regular season sometimes different than using the same approach for winning in the playoffs.
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But with a roster featuring older and more injury-prone stars in Embiid and George, Morey said several times that next season’s roster is going to be younger and more dynamic to try to make up for that.
“In my opinion when you have an MVP-level talent, you need to make aggressive moves to upgrade around that talent in that window,” Morey said. “That’s what we did last offseason, and we feel good about it going forward. I think it’s such a unique thing to have a player of that caliber.
“Are we somewhat indexed to talented players who are a little bit more injured? Yes, but that’s why we need to have a younger, deeper roster on them and then have them healthy going into the playoffs next year.”
Then there’s the matter of Philadelphia’s top-six protected first-round pick — one that, heading into the season, seemed destined to be winding up in the hands of the West-leading Oklahoma City Thunder, a relic of a trade to send Al Horford to the Thunder in exchange for Danny Green five years ago in one of Morey’s first moves upon arriving in Philadelphia.
But after the 76ers closed the season with a 5-31 record, the 76ers have given themselves the fifth spot in the NBA draft lottery next month — meaning they’ll have a 64% chance of hanging onto the pick.
Morey said that his plan for that pick, which he called a “tool” to improve the roster, was clear: to take the best player available, regardless of position or age or NBA readiness, despite the age and experience level of the player taken.
“Definitely best player available,” Morey said. “It has to be that high in the draft, for sure. Obviously, there’s a good chance we’ll take someone, and in that case, it will just be the best player. I’ve never shied away from that.”
The ultimate takeaway, though, was that despite all of the frustrations and disappointments of the past several months, Morey, Nurse and the rest of the franchise — like Maxey and George had said earlier Sunday before the game — believe that, with some health and better roster planning this offseason, that things can look a lot different around here a year from now.
“If everything sets up well, we’ll have a younger, more dynamic roster around a healthy Joel, Tyrese and Paul,” Morey said. “I never felt like coach had a healthy literally one game with all three of them. I know they played some games together, but they didn’t finish all of them and even the ones where it was like their first game back.
“It was tough … for me personally it was obviously the toughest season of my career, and I’ll just say personally I will spend every waking hour figuring out how turn this team around going into next season.”
