In today's episode of The Sixers Beat, Rich and I go over the moves the Sixers have made

so far in free agency, from signing Dwight Howard to a minimum contract, to trading Zaire

Smith for Tony Bradley, what they can do with their taxpayer mid-level exception, and also a few stray thoughts from around a league.

Enjoy the podcast.

All right, welcome, everybody. This is Derek Botner, joined as always by Rich Hoffman on The Sixers Beat, part of the Athletics Podcast Network. Hey, doing Rich.

I'm good, man, you know, caught up on some sleep the last couple nights. The free agency frenzy has been a little slower than in past years.

Like, I feel like Woj was tweeting out and Chams were tweeting out a day before last offseason what was going on.

And Al Horford was done and Jimmy was gone by, I don't know, seven, eight o'clock, you know.

And now we just have a little bit of a slow trickle with the Sixers. Yeah, we had, we had more activity on draft night this year than maybe we're accustomed to, at least in terms of big names that we're accustomed to, but we had less activity on free agency. And, you know, like you said, it was, um, we had a whirlwind couple of days there. Like, we're just not used to having the draft or the pre-agency two days after the draft. And look, I don't want to

complain. I got a little blowback on Twitter for complaining. I'm not complaining. We have, we're incredibly lucky to have our jobs, but that was a very hectic, you know, 72 hours there. And it was nice to take a step back a little bit, see what was going on, catch up on some sleep,

and sort of watch the rest of the NBA light itself on fire in free agency, which they frequently do, which Darrell Mori warned you about previously in the week, that free agency is where a lot of mistakes happened. I certainly do think that could be the case with some teams this year. We will get to that in a bit. I guess recapping sort of the moves the Sixers did make,

which were few and far between. They signed Dwight Howard to a one-year minimum contract,

which is a one-year $2.6 million deal that counts less than that on a cap. I forget

exactly what it is. One point six million. Yeah. It basically counts the same as a two-year,

the minimum salary for a two-year vet.

They do that so teams aren't incentivized to sign young players to save money over old established veterans.

So the Sixers did that.

They waived Norval Pell, poor one out for the Norville Pell era.

They also waived Mario Shyak, who was on a two-way contract.

Pell was actually on an NBA contract with a non-guarantee for this year. Shyak was on a two-way contract. Pell was actually on an NBA contract with a non-guarantee for this year.

Shyak was on a two-way deal.

They signed Dakota Matthias to a two-way contract.

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