Ever since signing a 5 year, 180-million-dollar contract with the Sixers back in 2019, many have called it one of the worst contracts in the NBA, and one that severely limited the Sixers flexibility in cap. He was taking up a bunch of cap space, and his contract was so big that few teams would be willing to trade for him.
However, this is Harris' last year in the deal, making him an expiring player. He's due just over 39 million for this season, and re-building teams or teams looking to increase their cap greatly in the next off-season may have interest in trading Harris. On the Sixers part, they could trade Harris for a few young role-players to help with their roster. And for those of you that think that this is unlikely to happen: the Lakers were able to pull this off when they traded away Westbrook following the deadline.
So given that Harris is now on an expiring contract, does that make him a valuable trade asset?
Not really, but a team like the Bulls could send you Demar and Lonzo and look to max out someone like Siakam with their capspace, I guess.
But more likely Philly just keeps Harris, lets him expire, trades some 2nds to get off of Tucker's last year (or even a protected first and gets some 2nds back, someone like the Wizards would jump on this) and goes into the summer with Embiid, Reed, Maxey's cap hold and 75M in cap room to try to find 4 more rotation guys around those 3. Maybe Melton gets extended and it's like 60M to find 2 guys and they just roll with a top 6 and look for depth later, maybe move their 2024 1st on draft day for a cheap rotation guy like Caruso or Caleb Martin and then if you keep Melton at 14M per that's like 50M to go after DeRozan/OG/Siakam/Klay as a 3rd star, could be just about swingable.