In the wake of the James Harden trade, the Sixers are now poised to be the biggest player on the free-agent market next summer. They could carve out more than $55 million in salary-cap space, making them the only playoff-caliber team with that type of spending power.
Sixers president Daryl Morey wouldn’t prefer to wait that long to make his next big splash, though.
“Ideally, we would actually sort of use that cap space early,” Morey told reporters Wednesday after the Harden trade became official. “That’s generally better, because then you both have the front-end flexibility and then the back-end flexibility to re-sign them, and then you can see who becomes available.