The Philadelphia 76ers have agreed to a two-year, $12.3 million contract with free agent guard Anfernee Simons, per Shams Charania of ESPN. The deal includes a player option on the second season.
If the Jaylen Brown trade was the swing, this is the follow-through. Philadelphia’s reserves ranked in the bottom three of the league last season in both scoring and made three-pointers, a weakness that showed up nightly whenever Tyrese Maxey sat. Simons is a direct answer to that specific problem: he averaged 14.2 points and shot 39.5 percent from three across 49 games as Boston’s sixth man last season before the Celtics moved him to Chicago in the Nikola Vucevic deal. He has done the exact job Philadelphia is hiring him to do, in the same conference, within the past twelve months.
The price is the notable part. Simons made over $27 million last season on the final year of his Portland extension; he will make less than half that in Philadelphia. Per Charania, the Warriors, Heat, Nuggets, Mavericks and Pacers all had interest, and Simons chose the Sixers because he saw the fit — which is another way of saying the market for one-way bench scorers has corrected, and Philadelphia was positioned to benefit. A front office that just sent out four draft picks for Brown needed its supporting cast to come cheap. This one did.
The roster construction logic holds up. Brown and Maxey will carry the starting units, VJ Edgecombe gets runway in the backcourt, and Joel Embiid‘s minutes will be managed as always — which means bench units in Philadelphia will play real, consequential minutes in real, consequential games. Simons’s defensive limitations are well documented, and a second unit built around him will have to outscore its problems. But that is a tolerable flaw in a fifth or sixth option on $6 million a year. It is the kind of contract contenders look back on in May and call a steal, and the kind a team only lands when the plan is working well enough that players want in.
