Nick Piccone
Nerlens Noel will probably land the Sixers the best package if he’s traded, and he knows it. He fired his agent a few days ago and probably would like to be showcased a little more than eight minutes in a game.
Last night after the Sixers’ loss against the Lakers, Noel sounded off in the locker room and didn’t mince words when talking about just how frustrated he was with the whole three big men problem the Sixers have.
“Like I said before, there’s too much on the coach’s plate. Who knows? Like I said, the guys who run the operations – they do what they do … It is what it is. I just wanna be on the court playing basketball. I don’t care who I’m playing with. I’m not an eight minute player so I dunno what that’s about. I don’t care where, I don’t really care. I just wanna be on the court playing basketball. I think I’m too good to be playing eight minutes. Nah, that’s crazy. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. Need to figure this shit out. F— it.
“I control what I can control. In this situation, the smartest thing I can do is to control what I can control. Work hard and there’s things I can work on but, like I said, there’s just too much on the coach’s plate. So, regardless of who handles it, I just think there’s a lot of frustration.”
I’m with Noel. He scored two points with five rebounds and a block in those eight minutes, while Joel Embiid and Jahlil Okafor played 28 and 23 minutes, respectively. The Embiid-Okafor experiment really hasn’t worked out at all, and Embiid-Noel has a better chance of working out long-term. But it certainly sounds like Noel – who can become a free agent after the season – is already done with the experiment despite just returning to the lineup last week after a knee injury. I’d like the Sixers to extend him, but it’s seeming more and more likely that Noel will be playing with another team next season, if not later this season.