PHILADELPHIA — Give Daryl Morey credit. You may not like the game that he plays, but he plays it better than anybody in the National Basketball Association. It is a game where regrets can be indefinitely postponed, where downstream risks are upstream opportunities, where the future is no less uncertain a place when prioritized over the present. It is a counterintuitive game, one that forsakes many of the fundamental tenets of traditional roster-building. It is also a game that has consistently delivered to the Sixers a better chance at a championship than they had the year before. This year will be no different.

Forget the risks, for a moment. Forget the multitude of ways this can blow up in their face. Forget the age of the player, forget his motivations for signing, forget the challenge of filling out a roster with three massive salaries and little room to maneuver. In Paul George, who agreed to sign a four-year, $212 million contract on Monday morning, the Sixers have added a player who offers them a chance at winning a title. No other avenue would have allowed them to say as much.

That’s the key point. It is a philosophical one. Is signing George a good move? It depends on your definition of good. In fact, it depends on whether you even believe in the concept of “good” in the first place. In Morey’s world, “good” is just another word for “not the best.” It is a middle ground that distracts from the zero-sum reality of chasing a championship. Good is not an objective. It is a consolation prize, a coping mechanism. Good is the refuge of leaders who cannot handle the zero-sum reality of chasing a championship. It is an artificial construct created by those who need a more attainable objective than becoming the best.

In Morey’s world, the risks of signing George, considerable as they are, pale in comparison to the risks of not signing him. The downside of George is more spectacular than the downside of a more conservative roster-building strategy. But the downside of the latter strategy is that there is no upside. Which makes it nonsensical.

In Morey’s world, there are only optimal strategies and suboptimal ones. Every suboptimal strategy has the same likely outcome: You don’t win a championship. You might as well choose the one that offers the most upside.

George offers that upside. Nobody should debate that. Even at 34 old, he is coming off a season in which he was among the best two-way players in the league. He shot 41.3% from 3-point range, converted 70% of his shots at the rim, scored more than half of his 2-point buckets without an assist, got to the foul line. All that to go with his defense.

Swap that player in for Tobias Harris and the Sixers beat the Knicks. They beat the Pacers. They give the Celtics a run for their money. There was no other move, no combination of moves, that would have given the Sixers as good of a chance in 2024-25 as they will have with George.

That’s the thinking. It is sound. Look at the betting markets. With George, the Sixers are suddenly the third betting favorite to win the 2024-25 NBA title. FanDuel has them at 8.5-1, behind only the Celtics (3-1) and the Nuggets (7.5-1), ahead of the Thunder (9-1), the Knicks (9.5-1), and the Timberwolves (9.5-1). Only one other time in the Embiid Era have the Sixers begun a season at better than 12-1. That year was, improbably, 2019-20, when they went off at 7.5-1 after trading away Jimmy Butler, signing Al Horford, and re-signing Harris and Ben Simmons to contract extensions. Take from that what you will.

The downside is just as big as it was that season. It comes with the philosophy. The odds that the Sixers won’t win a championship are probably greater than more conventionally built teams that currently rank behind them on the Upside-o-Meter. Their path is narrower. They have fewer outs. The deeper the team, the more diffuse the risk. If OG Anunoby goes down with an injury, the Knicks still have the team they had last season, plus Mikal Bridges. The Celtics won a title in a postseason when Kristaps Porziņģis missed 12 of 19 games.

The Sixers will not win a title in a world where George and Embiid are not both healthy. That’s a daunting statement given their track records. George has missed more games than Embiid himself over the last four regular seasons. He has missed an entire postseason.

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