Does Paul George believe James Harden about Daryl Morey?

The Sixers vs. Clippers battle over PG has a pretty interesting twist.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Choosing; George Frederic Watts; 1864

A little less than a year ago, James Harden made enormous headlines by calling Sixers boss Daryl Morey a liar.

That saga eventually resulted in the Sixers trading a disgruntled Harden to the L.A. Clippers. The Sixers were unable or unwilling (given Joel Embiid’s midseason injury) to flip assets gained from the Harden trade into anything more at the trade deadline, and instead reserved their powder for the 2023-24 offseason. The Clippers, meanwhile, had a crazy impressive stretch during the season, gave Kawhi Leonard a rich 3-year extension and … lost in the first round with Kawhi on and off the sidelines.

And now with Paul George refusing to accept the same short extension Kawhi took, the Sixers are in the purported driver’s seat to land him if he leaves Los Angeles.

The great

Marc Stein

has some details on the status of the PG saga. As news circulated last week that the Sixers are not as interested in George as believed, Stein says other teams don’t buy that. He also reports this:

[The] incumbent team's apparent reluctance to extend George a longer or richer deal than Kawhi Leonard's recent three-year contract extension in the $150 million range has put George's future in legitimate flux.

PG wants more than what Kawhi received. That’s an interesting twist in this relationship.

On a podcast with Zach Lowe, Bobby Marks indicated that it could be quite attractive at this point for PG’s camp to follow a similar playbook to Chris Paul in 2017 and arrange an opt-in tied to a trade followed by a new contract with the new team next summer.

I’m not sure this type of move helps the Sixers’ too much simply because they have such little salary to trade, so they’d likely need to absorb PG into cap space. So adding more players plus PG and then signing Tyrese Maxey followed by a longer contract for PG next summer: I don’t think it works without some truly bonkers cap sheet manipulation from Morey, who, in fairness, is the master of truly bonkers cap sheet manipulation.

Here’s the reason I don’t think this works, though: