The very first trade Sixers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey agreed to after arriving in Philadelphia has suddenly returned to the forefront.
In the hours leading up to the 2020 NBA Draft, Morey was determined to shed the remaining three years of Al Horford's four-year, $109 million contract. And he found a way, flipping Horford to the Oklahoma City Thunder for veteran wing Danny Green. The price: the No. 34 pick that night plus a distant, lightly-protected first-round pick. That first-rounder turned out to be the Sixers' 2025 top-six protected pick.
Exactly four years to the day of that trade, a much different Sixers team held a lengthy postgame team meeting in which Tyrese Maxey -- drafted No. 21 overall by the Sixers hours after Morey's first deal -- reportedly called out Joel Embiid for being late "to everything." They had just suffered an embarrassing collapse in a road loss to the Miami Heat, dropping their record on the season to 2-11. Two nights later, the Sixers finally debuted their "Big 3" of Embiid, Maxey and Paul George -- and lost again. They are 2-12, and enter Thursday in sole possession of the NBA's worst record.
Suddenly, Sixers fans are getting ready to turn off NBA games and begin watching college basketball in preparation for June. But the Sixers remain hopeful to turn this thing around and make a playoff push, and if that happens, they will almost certainly be saying goodbye to their 2025 first-round pick.
The Sixers would only keep their 2025 first-rounder if it lands within the top six selections. Even if that does happen, they would not be out of the woods. They would then owe Oklahoma City their first-rounder in 2026, top-four protected. If true disaster struck, and as a result the Sixers kept their pick once again, they would then owe their 2027 first-rounder to Oklahoma City, top-four protected again. If the Sixers have still not conveyed a first-round pick to the Thunder at that point, they would send Oklahoma City their 2027 second-rounder.
Like practically every season before it for the last half-decade, the Sixers entered 2024-25 with the goal of being serious championship contenders. Not even a month into the season, it is time to ask the question: what would need to happen for the Sixers to protect their first-round pick, bumping their obligation to the Thunder to next season?
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In this discussion, it is important to discuss the new rules for the NBA Draft Lottery, which were supposedly implemented to discourage tanking but have showed few signs of actually doing that.
The league used to draw a lottery for the first three selections, with each team's odds of earning a premium pick being greater if they had a worse regular season record in the season which had just concluded. The league made a few critical changes to the format, including adjusting the odds so that the three worst teams all had equal chances of landing one of the top few selections.
The change to focus on here is that the lottery now draws for the top four picks, not three (the remaining order is determined by regular season record, from worst to best). In the past, a team could only drop three slots below its pre-lottery standing. Now, though, the team with the worst record in the NBA could fall down to as far as the No. 5 pick.
So, how can the Sixers guarantee they keep their first-round pick in 2025? The answer is simple: finish the regular season with one of the two worst records in the NBA. If they do that, it is mathematically impossible for the lottery to wrestle the Sixers' pick into Oklahoma City's hands.
Even with the Sixers experiencing the disaster of all disasters through 14 games this season, though, that outcome still seems unrealistic unless even more injury-related developments of the catastrophic sort strike the team soon.
So, let's break down the odds of the Sixers keeping their 2025 first-round pick, protected for the top six selections, depending on each spot in the lottery the team could conceivably land in.
For assistance, it is time to call upon a very old friend: Tankathon.com, the world's foremost resource for all things NBA Draft and NBA Draft Lottery, which was once bookmarked by every Sixers fan for many years. Here are the odds for each lottery slot -- assuming no ties -- courtesy of Tankathon:
Now, let's see what the Sixers' chances would be of holding onto their first-round pick if they fell in each spot in the lottery drawing (assuming no ties in the standings, which could skew the odds slightly in either direction depending on where a tie takes place):
| Lottery position | Sixers' chance of keeping first-rounder |
| 1 | 100.0% |
| 2 | 100.0% |
| 3 | 93.0% |
| 4 | 81.1% |
| 5 | 64.0% |
| 6 | 45.8% |
| 7 | 31.9% |
| 8 | 26.3% |
| 9 | 20.2% |
| 10 | 13.9% |
| 11 | 9.4% |
| 12 | 7.1% |
| 13 | 4.7% |
| 14 | 2.4% |
There you have it: in order to have greater than a 50 percent chance of hanging onto their first-round pick, the Sixers would need to finish the season with a bottom-five record. They are close to a coin flip in the sixth slot of the lottery, and after that they will have to leapfrog other teams into the top four in order to avoid going home empty-handed.
This is not a story I anticipated writing 29 days after the Sixers' first game of the regular season. But here we are!
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