BOB MYERS SAT on the baseline of what is now called Rocket Arena in Cleveland in June 2017, watching over the Golden State Warriors , when he did something he hates. "I don't like these kinds of harsh phrases but, 'you're either getting better or you're getting worse,'" Myers said, when asked if he ever worried that adding a superstar like Kevin Durant to a Warriors team that had won a championship in 2015 and NBA record 73 games in 2016 could disrupt the special alchemy that group had found.
"No team, no business, we don't just flatline. So if you have a chance to get a guy like Kevin Durant ...
it should be simple, 'Let's try to get better.' You don't have to be that smart to see what he can do." Nine years later, in a very different role, on a very different team, Myers found himself with the same kind of zero sum choices this offseason: Was Daryl Morey still the right president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers ? Was superstar forward Jaylen Brown worth trading for?
Was LeBron James the right finishing addition for this team? As an executive and leader, Myers has made a name for himself with emotional intelligence and social grace.
When he helped build those dynastic Warriors teams as the general manager, he was able to do so from the ground up, with Stephen Curry and coach Steve Kerr as the ultimate cultural loadstones and perfectly interlocking components such as future Hall of Famers Klay Thompson and Draymond Green . The job in Philadelphia is very different.
Myers -- the president of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment , which owns the 76ers -- isn't building off a solid foundation. If anything he's reverse engineering after the foundation the Sixers had been built on in the "Trust the Process" era, crumbled.
The big swings for Jimmy Butler III , James Harden and Paul George never got Philadelphia out of the second round of the playoffs. Former No.
1 pick Ben Simmons is out of the league. MVP center Joel Embiid is on the wrong side of 30 with knees that will need close, careful management for the rest of his career and a virtually immovable contract that has swelled to over $60 million a season.
"The Process is over," one NBA coach told ESPN. "This needs to be the product.
They need to finish this thing. The Sixers have done this for a long time with Embiid and it's go time." Though the questions he has been tasked with solving in Philadelphia are very different from the ones he answered in Golden State, Myers applied the same "you're either getting better or you're getting worse" logic in replacing Morey , and adding Brown and James .
"I can totally see why they did it," one Eastern Conference executive said of the Sixers' moves to acquire Brown and James. "They're desperate.
They needed to do something else before they get through to the next thing. "So getting Jaylen for what they got him for is a good risk.
Getting LeBron on a minimum is outstanding. "What I'm not sure is why [James] did it.
You've got a lot of guys who want the ball in their hands. Who's setting screens?
Who's doing the dirty work? Who's defending?
A lot of that is going to fall to LeBron, I think." SHORTLY AFTER JAMES made his announcement , 76ers All-Star guard Tyrese Maxey posted a video of himself celebrating with the caption, "I'm like Coach Cal." He was referring to his former college coach, John Calipari, who has routinely landed top recruiting classes at Kentucky, Memphis and now at Arkansas. Maxey, who played one season for Calipari in 2019-20, was among a small group of people who got some inkling late Thursday night that James would ultimately choose the Sixers, according to sources.
James has known Maxey for years and is represented by the same agency. But even he didn't fully believe it was real until he saw ESPN's Shams Charania report the news and James put his statement out on X on Friday.
"I still want to sacrifice. I still want to work.
I still want to grind," James wrote on X . "I still want to compete, to win and have a chance at the feeling of winning another championship.
"I believe I can help make the Philadelphia 76ers a championship team and I am so excited to energize a new fan base and start this incredible journey one last time." Those close to James say they believe him when he said in his statement that he thought he "was done when the season ended." But as he decompressed and evaluated where he was in his life and career, the feeling of leading a team and winning the way he'd done in th