With the 2024-25 Sixers season officially in the rearview mirror, the time has come to evaluate the few highs and many lows of a disastrous campaign in which the team only managed 24 wins. We will do so in "Sixers year-in-review," a series assessing each individual Sixers player's performance this year based on numbers, film and quotes, while also looking ahead to the future.
Up next: Eric Gordon.
Gordon signed a two-year, veteran's minimum contract with a player option last summer, joining the Sixers in pursuit of his first NBA championship. But as the team failed to get off the ground, the sharpshooter struggled mightily. Gordon was out of the rotation by December, missed a few games because of a dental issue, returned and shot the lights out for a month, then started to regress before suffering a season-ending wrist injury.
Does Gordon have what it takes to help an NBA contender moving forward? Will he be back in Philadelphia? Let's examine:
SIXERS YEAR-IN-REVIEW
Joel Embiid | Guerschon Yabusele | Paul George | Jared McCain | Tyrese Maxey | Andre Drummond | Quentin Grimes | Jared Butler | Kyle Lowry | Kelly Oubre Jr. | Justin Edwards | Ricky Council IV | Eric Gordon
What we learned in 2024-25
Gordon's skills in areas beyond three-point shooting are no longer good enough for him to be trusted as a rotation regular.
Gordon's red-hot month of January helped him finish his shortened season with a 40.9 three-point percentage despite struggling for much of it. But he did not do enough otherwise to be someone the Sixers could reliably count on for quality minutes. In recent years, Gordon has turned into somewhat of a specialist with suboptimal size for an off-ball guard, not much off-the-dribble ability and limited overall movement skills. But he seemed to decline quite a bit in all of those areas this season.
While Gordon is one of the most accomplished long-range shooters in recent NBA history — good enough that he does not necessarily need to be a positive-impact player elsewhere to help a team win — his increased drop-off athletically and all of its ramifications made it much harder for Gordon to let his shooting stroke do the talking.
Gordon was almost never a threat to score inside the arc (more on this momentarily), which was less problematic than his inability to separate in any capacity offensively or stay in front of guards defensively. By the end of Gordon's season, he was frequently being used as a larger wing defensively despite only being listed at 6-foot-3. Head coach Nick Nurse found ways to utilize Gordon's physicality and strength at times, but it was probably not a sustainable role.
Number to know
Gordon's total minutes played with Joel Embiid in 2024-25: 42.
When the Sixers signed Gordon, the fit seemed incredibly obvious, thanks in large part to Embiid's history of forming stellar partnerships with shooting guards who were elite marksmen. Gordon has never been a movement shooter of the caliber of JJ Redick and Seth Curry, for example, but his range is significantly better than what those two players brought alongside Embiid. Even when the former NBA MVP is not at his best, he draws significant interior attention that generates clean looks for three-point shooters.
Gordon started for the Sixers on opening night with Embiid sidelined, and it felt as if Nurse was hoping to get him comfortable in that spot so he could remain there when Embiid was ready to play. But because both players failed to be consistently available, they barely ever spent time on the floor together (the only teammates Gordon played fewer minutes with were Quentin Grimes and Pete Nance).
The Sixers failed to ever witness anything resembling the vision they had for the team they constructed. Even worse, they never actually got to see it fail. The Embiid-Gordon partnership is one of many aspects of the team that was supposed to be valuable but never got set in motion.
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Important film
The Sixers were hoping to establish Gordon as a key piece from the outset, but within the first few games it became clear his role needed to be altered. Gordon looked like someone whose brain was moving much faster than his body: he would use a crafty move or fake to open up a driving lane, but he did not have enough speed to actually score going downhill. A series of blocked shots at Gordon's expense very early in the season set the tone in a negative fashion:
Eric Gordon keeps on getting blocked: pic.twitter.com/r6ucU3XvnA
— Adam Aaronson's clips (@SixersAdamClips) October 26, 2024
Gordon's limitations inside the arc have been present for a while now, but they reached new heights in his first year with the Sixers. It is not the worst thing in the world that his shot profile featured more threes than ever (career-high .672 three-point attempt rate), but any sort of limited offensive versatility enables defenses to load up even more against a player's strength.
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Salient soundbite
Gordon in his exit interview on April 13 on his season-ending wrist injury:
"Rehab's been going pretty good. I would say I'm definitely ahead of schedule right now, but it's going be a long process. But I'm headed in the right direction, starting to dribble a little bit… It was tough because I wanted to play as many games as I can, and it was hurting bad when it happened, so I was trying to grind through it for a little while and then when I got hit with the bad news… of course it was disappointing, and this year it was tough for us, too, so we [will] reflect on that. It's just been a tough overall year."
Question heading into the future
Does Gordon want to be in Philadelphia?
Even if the answer is yes, he will almost certainly decline his player option. An explainer from February:
"Technically, Gordon will have a decision to make on his $3,468,960 player option by June 29, but there is not much of a decision to be made unless Gordon has zero market elsewhere. His projected minimum salary if he signs a new deal with any team is worth just over $3.6 million, which makes declining the option to sign a new minimum deal the smart play. And this actually would help the Sixers if he ends up back in Philadelphia: if he returns on a one-year deal, his salary cap hit will be reduced to just under $2.3 million. This is because, while there is a sliding scale of minimum salaries that increases for players with more years of service, all minimum signings have the same cap hit to ensure teams are not inclined to stray away from signing older players."
However, salary cap nerd notes aside, if Gordon wants to return, he will do so at that smaller number. Gordon, who will turn 37 years old on Christmas, is far closer to the end of his career than the beginning, has made a ton of money (though he is likely a minimum player no matter who he signs with at this point) and the only thing that appears missing from his career is a ring. It is fair to question why he would return to the Sixers if winning is his top priority.
Contract information
Gordon will make a decision on the $3,468,960 player option by June 29, but again, it is just about a formality that he will decline that. If he does, Gordon will become an unrestricted free agent. He would immediately become eligible to be traded if he accepted the option.
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