September 14, 2024
Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Imagn Images
KJ Martin will be the center of trade speculation in the month leading up to the 2025 NBA Trade Deadline.
Welcome to our Sixers player preview series! Between now and Sixers Media Day on Sep. 30, we will preview each one of the 14 players on the team's standard roster, posing two critical questions that will help determine their fate in 2024-25 before making a prediction about the player's season to come.
Today, let's focus on a player whose on-court value to the Sixers has gotten lost in the shuffle a bit over the summer: KJ Martin, who returned to the team on a unique contract that will likely lead to him becoming a trade asset. What does Martin offer, and is he more than just eventual trade bait?
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Martin is still only 23 years old, but he is entering his fifth NBA season, so the book on him is pretty much out. Martin is strong and sturdy, and he is also one of the single most dynamic athletes in the league. His leaping ability is outrageous -- he has been in an NBA Dunk Contest before, and could very well end up there again. Those strengths are evident.
But his weaknesses are evident, too. Martin's strength enables him to play power forward regularly, but listed at 6-foot-6, whether or not Martin could play center for more than a few minutes at a time in particular matchups is very much up for debate. And that becomes a bit of an issue because Martin is not much of an offensive threat. Not only has he never made more than 68 total three-pointers in a season, but he is also not particularly effective as a driver despite his explosiveness. Martin can throw down an occasional dunk on an alley-oop or offensive rebound, but that might be the extent of his utility on that end of the floor.
Martin shot 36.0 percent on 2.1 attempts per game across his first pair of NBA seasons. That is nothing special, particularly on such low volume, but it was a good starting point. Martin's shooting mechanics look clean; he has a quick and compact release that is easy to repeat. But his three-point percentage has gone down to 31.1 percent in his last two seasons on even lower volume. His 71.4 free throw percentage as a rookie is his best career mark.
Aside from an encouraging aesthetic, there are few indicators that Martin will ever become even an average shooter, let alone a decent or good one. If Martin can shoot at the level he did in his first two seasons with the Houston Rockets -- modest efficiency on low volume -- he can be a rotation player for the Sixers or another team. If he is essentially a non-shooter, like he was for the Sixers last year, it will become much harder for Sixers head coach Nick Nurse to slot him into the rotation.
The Sixers brought back Martin on an unconventional contract structure: technically, Martin signed a two-year, $16 million contract. An $8 million average annual value is well above what one would have anticipated him receiving after his underwhelming 2023-24 season, but the second year of his deal is non-guaranteed, meaning he effectively signed a one-year contract.
When teams re-sign players on one-year deals, those players receive an automatic no-trade clause. So, the Sixers tacked on a second season without any guaranteed money and inflated his short-term earnings to make him a viable trade piece when the trade deadline comes around in the winter. Teams have to match salaries in deals, and the Sixers lacked medium-sized contracts on their books, so it made all of the sense in the world to ink Martin to this deal. One writer even wrote a story suggesting they do exactly that weeks ahead of free agency.
Martin agreed to the "balloon deal," and that makes him far and away the most likely Sixer to be traded at this year's deadline. While nobody with the team will say it out loud -- for very understandable reasons -- the Sixers signed Martin to a deal specifically designed to facilitate a future trade.
So, what happens if Martin makes major strides as a shooter, continues to grow as a unique, multipositional defensive weapon and becomes a fixture of Nurse's rotation? Would they still be looking to use his balloon deal to add a contributor with a longer track record? They could choose to hang onto Martin at that point, but then they would once again be dealing with the issue of not having medium-sized deals to use in trades.
Martin is moved at the trade deadline, but plays well enough that the Sixers strongly consider keeping him around for the rest of the season.
There is a surprisingly apt piece of precedent here. One of the three other players who joined Martin in the trade sending them from the Los Angeles Clippers to Philadelphia was Marcus Morris Sr., a veteran stretch four with an expiring contract worth just over $17.1 million whose best days were behind him. He was salary filler in the deal that sent James Harden to the Clippers, and it was immediately assumed that Morris would eventually be re-routed by the Sixers as salary filler for a more significant contributor.
Morris joined his hometown team with little to no expectations as far as his on-court production. But he gave the team a few months of solid play at the four and five, and suddenly whether or not he should be moved at all became a serious discussion. The Sixers had been extremely pleased with Morris' play, but ultimately decided the opportunity cost of holding onto him was too great. He became salary filler in a deal that landed the Sixers veteran sharpshooter Buddy Hield. Even as Hield's minutes and quality of play declined over time, it was the right move: Hield gave them far more production than Morris would have down the stretch of the season.
I see Martin following a similar trajectory. He would be my bet to emerge as the Sixers' ninth (and likely final) rotation player to begin the season, ahead of Guerschon Yabusele and Ricky Council IV, in part because of Nurse's familiarity with Martin. I expect him to shoot just well enough to be playable on offense and stand out on defense. I also believe a full offseason and training camp with some temporary certainty about his location could do Martin a lot of good.
Martin absolutely has the potential to surpass the expectations set for him, which appear to be quite meager. But he would have to do that by a significant amount to sway the Sixers away from trading him for a more established piece.
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