The Sixers play the Suns this afternoon, and with Mikal Bridges having himself a nice run of form in the bubble, Kyle has returned to Twitter to defend his Villanova guy and rip the local squad for trading the local kid on draft night two years ago.

Philly, operating without a GM during the post-Burnergate era, decided to take Bridges with the 10th overall pick and flip him to the Suns for their pick and Miami’s 2021 first rounder. Then they went for Zhaire Smith at number 16, eventually using the extra pick in the Tobias Harris trade and later giving him a $180 million dollar contract.

It seems like we’ve stumbled into a re-litigation of the Bridges trade, which we love to do on various Philadelphia sports mediums. There’s nothing like hindsight!

But first, lets take a quick look at who came off the board between Bridges and Smith:

  • Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
  • Miles Bridges
  • Jerome Robinson
  • Michael Porter Jr.
  • Troy Brown Jr.

And then Donte DiVincenzo and Lonnie Walker went 17th and 18th overall. We now know the Sixers would have been better off gambling on Porter Jr., who came into the draft with significant injury concerns following his brief college “career.” There were question marks there. SGA would look REALLY nice on this team, but at the time Ben Simmons was the point guard and I guess they didn’t see that as a position of need. Ironically SGA has become a really good combo guard in the NBA, so go figure. Ultimately, they flipped Bridges, the older player, for an asset and a project player in Smith, a younger guy believed to have a higher ceiling. Obviously he got off to a slow start because of the debilitating allergy situation that crushed his rookie season, but if memory serves me correctly it was close to a 50/50 split on fan attitude towards the Bridges and Smith+pick trade.

Another consideration is that Mikal would have come off the bench as a role player that year. He was viewed by many as a lesser Robert Covington, and there was some redundancy in drafting another 3 and D player with other positions of need (mainly shooting and ball handling) needing to be filled. Even if the Sixers kept the Villanova wing and still executed the Jimmy Butler trade, Bridges probably would have remained on the bench, with Butler playing the three, Wilson Chandler going down to the four, and Simmons, Joel Embiid, and JJ Redick rounding out the starting lineup.

The other thing with Bridges is that he’s been mostly average with the Suns. He’s grown the most defensively and looks pretty sharp on that end, but his per-36 numbers as a sophomore aren’t anything that should make Sixers fans really truly feel like they’re missing out. Mikal shoots the three at 35.1% and upped his two-point percentage to 60.2%. He averages 11 and 5 this year, up from 10 and 4 last season, playing 1.6 fewer minutes per game.

This is where the Sixers would benefit the most from having him in the team:

 

Hypothetically, if they still made the Harris trade with other assets, you could roll out a lineup of Ben Simmons, Josh Richardson, Mikal Bridges, Tobias Harris, and Joel Embiid. I’m not sure how much better that is than a Shake Milton or Al Horford lineup, and you would still have a lack of ball-handling and perimeter shot creation with either grouping.

Bridges is in a good situation right now, a role player on a squad with an uber-scorer in Devin Booker, plus point contributors like Deandre Ayton and Ricky Rubio. Let’s also not forget that the Suns totally stunk before entering the bubble, and Mikal wasn’t exactly lighting the world on fire during portions of the regular season.

In hindsight, I think we could probably say that yes, the Sixers would be better off with Mikal Bridges than Zhaire Smith and a pick that got tossed into the Tobias Harris trade (leading to what some think was an overpay). That depends on your attitude towards Harris on a big-money deal.

But it’s also true that while Bridges is having a good run right now, he’s not a panacea for the many issues that ail the Sixers in 2020. This is more a peripheral re-litigation and nothing approaching Markelle Fultz or Jahlil Okafor territory.