The Bulls delivered the Sixers their final blow of the season on Sunday, when they beat them 122-102 and put on the final nail on their coffin. The 76ers campaign was nothing short of disastrous, as most of their stars suffered recurrent injuries throughout the competition.
This is why president of basketball operations Daryl Morey said he will be back this summer to “assess everything” and avoid this happening again. “Obviously a tough season … not where we expected to be,” he said during the end-of-season news conference, conducted alongside Nick Nurse 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 added. “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].”
At the start of the season, Philadelphia believed they were set to compete for the NBA title, but ended up having one of the league’s worst records at 24-58. This is why it comes as a surprise that the franchise’s president has decided to continue to deposit his trust in Nurse.
However, the failure to perform is understandable as injuries plagued the Sixers’ rosters throughout the campaign, especially for Joel Embiid, who underwent arthroscopic surgery on his left knee last week. The former league MVP was limited to 19 games, George to 41 and Maxey to 52.
As these three stars shared the court in only 15 games and for less than 300 minutes overall, Morey insisted that they would all be “100%” next season.”This has been a very complex situation for Joel, for our medical staff, for outside folks like Dr. Glashow and other.
“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,” Daryl 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.”
