Guerschon Yabusele leaving the Philadelphia 76ers in free agency was bad enough. Him going to the New York Knicks, of all teams, makes his departure even worse. You think that was the final blurb? Well, it’s about to become the worst of the worst.
The stars seemed to be slowly aligning for the 76ers to somehow successfully chart the course and end up keeping Yabusele on the roster when one of their biggest competitors for his services immediately went with another free agent. Then here came the Knicks, operating pretty silently and mounting a treacherous attack to snag the coveted free agent for themselves.
In the end, the Frenchman signed for two years and $12 million to head to the Big Apple. That is indeed his actual market value, but the 76ers could have easily extended an offer not far off from what Yabusele got, making his departure sting even more.
Guerschon Yabusele’s departure from the 76ers gets even worse
Philadelphia was widely believed to have been doing its earnest to dump more salary in order to be able to hand out a more lucrative offer to Yabusele, but obviously, that did not happen soon enough. At most, the 76ers could have tendered approximately $5.7 million. While that is still less than what the Knicks got off, this appears to be Yabusele jumping the gun sensibly so as to get the best offer at the earliest opportunity possible.
What makes this sting more for the 76ers is that they were completely doomed by the temporal aspect of the move. Yabusele’s camp probably saw how fast the free agency market was moving and how aggressive teams were in handing out deals — lucrative ones at that — which forced them to settle for the best offer without waiting for Philly to pull some strings, lest they risk seeing teams exhaust their spendable money and Yabusele ends up with much less.
Also, while this may be hasty, there is also the hard-to-ignore fact that Yabusele may have felt that the 76ers did not act with more grit with respect to his free agency. After all, it is widely known that the team’s utmost priority is to re-sign Quentin Grimes, and it is simply hard to believe that the Frenchman would easily jettison the franchise which ushered him back into the NBA and bought out his contract in Europe.
It’s all filled with inferences at this point, but it is not hard to read between the lines and glean what could have prompted Yabusele to head elsewhere. The Philadelphia 76ers have no time to pout, though, and it is now incumbent upon the front office to find a replacement for him without waiting for the moon to rise.