NBA Trade Deadline Day: Three Cost-Effective Targets to Improve the Sixers

It is the day of the NBA trade deadline and the Sixers have already made one deal, sending second-year guard Jared McCain to the Oklahoma City Thunder for draft capital in a move that drops them below the luxury tax line.

There is still time to make additions to the team and there are plenty of things Philadelphia can do to help this group reach its potential for the season. Having said that, here are some trade targets to accomplish that.

Jalen Smith

The Bulls big man has played the lion's share of his minutes at center this season, according to Cleaning the Glass.

Smith is making $9 million this season and is due roughly $9.4 million next season, per Spotrac. It would not be difficult for Philadelphia to cobble together the salary necessary to make this work without making significant subtractions from the team or stepping back over the luxury tax line.

Normally, the challenge with this sort of trade would be that the Sixers have a dearth of meaty salaries that don't add much game value to them. Kelly Oubre Jr. is making about $8.4 million and is an important starter. Quentin Grimes is make about $8.7 million and is the sixth man. He also functionally has a no-trade clause because he's playing on the qualifying offer. But because the Sixers can stack salaries to make this deal financially legal while also accomplishing their tax-related goals, a byproduct of this deal would be that they can open up roster spots to convert both Dominick Barlow and Jabari Walker to standard NBA contracts.

However, the Bulls would likely treat Smith as one of their better trade assets, seeing as he is not an expiring contract. So there would ostensibly have to be draft compensation involved to make this a deal worth co-signing for Chicago.

The rationale

Half of Smith's shots are threes and he's a very good three-point shooter. He's also a strong defensive rebounder and a slightly-above-average offensive rebounder. The strategy is simple. You get a stretch big behind Joel Embiid so that Tyrese Maxey has continuity in the types of defensive coverages he's seeing with and without Embiid. Yeah, they may trap or hedge hard out of screens, but Maxey has grown accustomed to having a credible shooting threat one pass away on those actions.

By nature of having shooting gravity, Smith would pull defensive players out of the paint, making it much easier for Maxey or any other ball-handler to drive without seeing extra pressure setting up in the paint. As things currently are, Nick Nurse and company are relying upon Adem Bona and Andre Drummond to man the middle when Embiid is unavailable. They are two bigs who are guarded as non-shooters, making it difficult for the offensive engines to sustain shot quality because of spacing.

I do think it becomes slightly more important to consider spacing for the ball-handlers behind Maxey in the wake of the McCain deal. Philadelphia seems comfortable putting the ball in VJ Edgecombe's hands. That's fine. But you're adding unnecessary challenge to the rookie's job if you're clogging his driving lanes with bigs who will not be guarded as shooters.

Smith is not much of a shot-blocker. But he's considerably younger than Drummond and more experienced than Bona is. It wouldn't be an unreasonable bet to think that he could also aid the interior defense in this environment, at least better than Drummond can. Perhaps he's not the bouncy rim deterrent that Bona is, but you also never know when Bona is going to pick up three fouls in five minutes.

Brice Sensabaugh

The 6-foot-6 Jazz wing fills it up from deep. He's very young. He's very inexpensive. Utah would probably want real draft capital for a guy who is under a $4.9 million team option through next season.

Fortunately for Philadelphia, it is not difficult to do this trade from a financial perspective at all. It is more a question of how much do they value Sensabaugh, which is another way of pondering how much draft capital they'd be willing to give up for him.

The rationale

Utah just acquired Jaren Jackson Jr. They might have Walker Kessler back next season. They just used a lottery pick on wing Ace Bailey. The Jazz likely have another premium lottery pick coming in a loaded 2026 draft class.

Where exactly does Sensabaugh fit into their long-term picture? They should be open to moving him for draft capital, kicking the can down the road for future cost-controlled prospects.

Sensabaugh is shooting just 34 percent on threes this season. They are just more than half of his shot volume. He shot 43 percent from deep last season with threes taking up 60 percent of his shot diet. He's attempting almost nine of them per 36 minutes.

While he's having a down year, I'd think that an environment in which the team is not 19 games below .500 and openly trying to tank would get him some better looks and improve his efficiency. There is a sniper in there.

The Sixers, as mentioned above, have a hole to fill now that they've shipped one of their best shooters to Oklahoma City. Philadelphia is a painfully average three-point-shooting team. Sensabaugh won't fix that on his own. But a 6-foot-6 gunner would provide the sort of defensive credibility they can trust in a playoff series, something that became increasingly obvious was not in the cards for McCain.

There will be a time when the Sixers need an offensive punch. There will continue to be peaks and valleys in the Grimes experience. You need another shooter you can turn to when the bottom falls out elsewhere. But Sensabaugh shouldn't just be dusted off in case of emergency when you need to swing a game back toward you. He's a credible rotation player.

Ty Jerome

The Memphis Grizzlies are merely days removed from triggering a full rebuild. That means they are in the market for draft capital and young players. Jerome is neither. He's on the first year of a cost-effective three-year pact. It makes very little sense to keep him a guard in his late 20s around.

Like with the two guys mentioned above, it would not be difficult to pull together the salary to make this deal work. It would be a matter of whether Philadelphia values what Jerome brings enough to expense draft capital to bring him in.

The rationale

Jerome is a 6-foot-5 combo guard with a good assist-to-turnover history. He's had two consecutvie seasons of high-level three-point shooting and has gotten off to a blistering start from deep with Memphis (he's played just three games this season due to a right calf injury). It is more than reasonable to have concerns about trading draft assets for a guy coming off a concerning leg injury. But it's not like Philadelphia would be asking him to take on a particularly heavy workload with Maxey, Edgecombe and Grimes already at their disposal.

The intrigue is the size and the efficiency. Jerome can scale onto the ball or off the ball, maintaining the development of Edgecombe's ball-handling skills while also being available to offer some experience against intricate defensive schemes or physical defenders. There's always something interesting about a player with that height running the offense because they can see the floor better than your traditionally-sized playmaking guard.

Jerome would put a better shooter on the floor next to Maxey-centric or Edgecombe-centric lineups on the nights when Grimes is frigid. He can give them some rest within the game by taking over the offense for a couple possessions. He would function as an insurance policy for times when you just don't feel all that comfortable letting Grimes or Edgecombe dictating possessions.

The clock is ticking.

Will the Sixers improve their roster, even if it's marginal, or will they stand pat and send the message that dollars matter more than winning does?