Philadelphia 76ers: The Ryan Broekhoff signing is about 2020-21 after all

The Ryan Broekhoff signing is a long-term play for the Philadelphia 76ers.

Well, I’ll be the first to admit it: I was wrong.

When the Philadelphia 76ers signed Australian sharpshooter Ryan Broekhoff late last month, I thought it was going to be big. I thought the team scrounged the open market, found an underappreciated asset at a position of need, and locked him up on a two-way deal to ensure he was eligible to play in the team’s final eight games of the regular season in the Sixers uniform and maybe more depending on internal illness.

Broekhoff is smart, very articulate, and most importantly a knockdown, 40 percent 3 point assassin. He played for Brett Brown in Australia, has a friendly relationship with Ben Simmons, and is the kind of low-cost player Elton Brand desperately need to surround his All-Star point guard with regardless of who is coaching the team this fall.

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*sigh*, as it turns out, this fall is the key phrase.

Though very few people noticed at the time, as Joel Embiid’s hazmat suit pretty much captured the basketball zeitgeist for the better part of a few hours, Broekhoff was not on the Sixers’ chartered flight from Philly to the NBA Bubble in Orlando. As it would turn out, that was intentional, as the soon-to-be-30-year old SG ultimately decided against joining his new team in Disney World, as his high-risk wife had unfortunately tested positive for Covid-19 and he needed to remain with her and their young son in this trying time.

Is this a bummer? Most certainly, especially for me and my fist pounding approval of the move – not to mention his legitimately sick wife – but just because Broekhoff (probably) won’t be playing basketball this summer with his new squad doesn’t mean his addition was a mistake.

If anything, this probably won’t have any impact on his future at all.

You see, whether Broekhoff appears in one game, zero games, or 24 games, the Sixers are still going to hold his Non-Bird Rights heading into the NBA offseason thanks to the two-way contract he signed in June. This will allow Brand and company to sign Broekhoff to an extension for up to four years at up to 120 percent of his two-year veteran minimum contract amount (a maximum of $7.8 million dollars). While it would still be nice to see how he fits on the court with the team’s current collection of players, Brown already knows who Broekhoff is as a player, as does anyone who watched him torch the Sixers coming off the bench on more than a few occasions since making his NBA debut in fall of 2018.

With Simmons’ max deal set to kick in later this year, finding well-fitting cursory pieces on cheap, long-term deals is the best strategy for keeping the team potent for the foreseeable future.

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Could Ryan Broekhoff ultimately join the Philadelphia 76ers before their first game back against the Indiana Pacers? Maybe so, but I hope he doesn’t. Some things just aren’t as important as family, and abandoning his sick wife and small child in a foreign country for a couple dozen minutes of garbage time action just doesn’t seem worth it. By signing his two-way contract, the Sixers now have Broekhoff’s Non-Bird Rights going into free agency, and that, my friends, is the real asset.