Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson taught the Philadelphia 76ers a lesson

Trading for Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson III marked the beginning of the end of an ugly era of Philadelphia 76ers basketball.

Typically, when a basketball team trades a trio of second-round picks for a pair of players who don’t re-sign at the end of the season, one would understandably call that move a failure.

I mean, why wouldn’t you? It’s not like the NBA provides teams with compensatory picks when their players leave in free agency a la the NFL. These sort of moves also have virtually no impact on the salary cap, as future draft picks have no cap value until used and thus can’t get a team under the cap or ease a luxury tax bill.

In actuality, when this sort of move goes down, and nothing substantive comes out of it, one should call it a straight-up failure by pretty much any evaluation.

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With that being said, I’m glad the Philadelphia 76ers traded three future second-round picks for Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson if for no other reason than it proved that the team’s then-current philosophy was not a winning one.

You see, when Elton Brand did the deed with the Golden State Warriors back in February, it was out of desperation. His crowning achievement as a GM – trading Dario Saric and Robert Covington to the Minnesota Timberwolves for Jimmy Butler– came four bounces away from a trip to the Eastern Conference Finals but dissolved almost immediately when the bonafide superstar wing requested a trade to Miami a few weeks later.

To make matters worse, Brand then extended Tobias Harris to a max-level contract very few cap specialists expected he’d demand, signed Al Horford to a $109 million deal, and all but passed on adding additional ball handlers in favor of co-opting a super-sized, defense-focused approach the league hadn’t seen since the San Antonio Spurs’ Twin Towers days.

After suffering through the first three-plus months of the season playing some of the least inspired basketball you’ll see this side of a VHS tape, Brand had seen enough. Was his desired scheme broken? What? Heavens no. Clearly, all his team needed was a few players measuring in at 6-foot-6 or shorter who were capable of knocking down the 3 and playing a little D.

Enter Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson III.

Now, to be fair, duking it out for a single spot in Brett Brown’s rotation is far from what either player expected when they agreed to veteran minimum deals in the summer of 2019. With Kevin Durant gone and Klay Thompson out indefinitely via injury, Burks and GRIII expected to join an on-the-fly-re-tooling-but-still-playoff-bound Warriors team looking for players to surround Steph Curry, Draymond Green, and sign-and-trade addition D’Angelo Russell.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. Steph couldn’t stay healthy, Russell was traded to the Timberwolves for Andrew Wiggins, and the Warriors were bad enough to earn the second overall pick in the 2020 NBA Draft. In theory, being traded to a contender should have been a dream come true… emphasis on in theory.

Chalk it up to expansive roles on a really bad team, but both Burks and Robinson were in the middle of career years and could have parlayed that success into much more lucrative contracts upon season’s end. By being traded to the Sixers and having their workloads diminished considerably, neither player was able to land a long-term deal in free agency – with Burks signing a one-year, $6 million deal with the New York Knicks, and Robinson III still unsigned into the second month of free agency.

But this isn’t about Burks and GRIII personally. No, this is more about what their additions taught the Sixers and how it set the franchise up for ‘The Daryl Morey Years.’

By inserting Burks and, to a lesser extent, Robinson into Brown’s rotation, the Sixers effectively found out once and for all that Brand’s philosophy for team building wasn’t going to work. Making trade after trade after trade like a game of 2k wasn’t going to create cohesion across a 15-man roster. And most importantly of all, Brown simply couldn’t get the most out of his players.

Had the Sixers remained with their pre-February core, maybe Brand would have been able to convince the Sixers’ front office that the team’s issues were solely on Brown. Maybe he would have received another shot to further reshape the roster in his vision, and Morey would have legitimately taken the 2020-21 season off to hang out with his kids.

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Trading for Burks and Robinson proved once and for all that surrounding Simmons and Embiid with shooters, scorers, and playmakers over one-way statues really is the best way to succeed moving forward. Heck, one could argue that players like Danny Green, Tyrese Maxey, and Steph’s younger brother are just better versions of Burks and Robinson, proving that the general consensus of surrounding a pair of ball-dominant paint scorers with shooters was right all along.

Al Horford may have never been traded for Green and Terrance Furgeson, Josh Richardson may not have been traded for Seth Curry, and the Sixers likely wouldn’t have any trade exemption to further fortify their bench further around the deadline save the $1.88 million exemption from flipping James Ennis to the Magic last spring.

*shivers* I couldn’t even imagine having to watch 2019-20 Sixers Part Deux.

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If you still believe trading three second-round picks for Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson III was a bad move by the Philadelphia 76ers, who am I to argue? The Sixers got zero playoff wins out of the duo, and it’s incredibly unlikely that either will ever wear a red, white, and blue Sixers jersey ever again. But by making the move, Elton Brand effectively proved his philosophy for roster construction was fundamentally flawed and that he simply couldn’t be trusted to properly allocate the team’s assets to build a contender. Without Burks and GRIII, we may not have Daryl Morey, Steph Curry, or Danny Green today, and frankly, that’s not a world I want to think about.