The Philadelphia 76ers fired Daryl Morey as president of basketball operations on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, ending a six-year run that produced five playoff appearances and zero conference finals. Bob Myers — president of sports at Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment and the architect of four Warriors championship rosters — steps in as interim head of basketball operations and will lead the search for a permanent replacement. Head coach Nick Nurse will return for his fourth season.
The decision arrived four days after the Knicks closed out a 4-0 second-round sweep with a 144-114 Game 4 win, capping a series in which Philadelphia lost four games by an average of 22.5 points. Josh Harris's statement: "After speaking with Daryl, we determined that it was time for a fresh start." Harris also acknowledged the organization had "fallen well short of our own expectations."
The numbers underneath
Morey finished 270-212 across six regular seasons in Philadelphia. The 2025-26 team went 45-37 and finished seventh in the East before upsetting Boston in the first round. The playoffs always told the same story: five appearances, one second-round series win, no further. For a franchise that hired Morey to translate Houston-era analytics into a championship roster around Joel Embiid, the gap between the inputs and the result became the whole job.
The roster bets
Morey's tenure was a sequence of expensive, defensible-on-paper bets that didn't compound. He traded for James Harden in 2022, watched that experiment collapse, recovered by flipping Harden to the Clippers for picks and salary. He signed Paul George to a max contract in 2024 — a move that read as a coronation when Embiid was healthy and as a cap-sheet anchor when neither star could stay on the court. He extended Embiid to another max. He drafted Tyrese Maxey in 2020 (a hit), VJ Edgecombe in 2024, and shipped Jared McCain to Oklahoma City at this year's deadline.
None of these moves were obviously wrong in isolation. The trouble was the load-bearing assumption underneath all of them: that Embiid would be available for the games that mattered. Six years of injury reports made that bet harder to defend each season, and by 2026 the front office's reputation rode on a star who couldn't stay healthy in May.
Why Bob Myers is the interim
Myers's title was always going to position him for this. As HBSE president of sports he sits above the franchise reporting line and reports directly to Harris and David Blitzer. He has the championship résumé — four titles in eight years with Golden State — and the executive-search relationships to run a credible process for the permanent role. The interim framing is doing real work in the announcement: it tells the league that Philadelphia is serious about a wide search, and it tells Embiid that the next person walking in the door will be chosen with him still in the room.
That last part matters more than the org chart. The next president inherits an Embiid extension, a George contract, a Maxey core, and a coach in Nurse who is one of the better in-game tacticians in the league. The job is not a rebuild. It's a recalibration around a roster that has the talent to win a conference final and hasn't.
What this signals about the modern front office job
Morey leaves with one of the better long-form analytics reputations in basketball and a six-season record that, in any other era, would qualify as a successful run. The standard has moved. Ownership groups now treat the front office as a marketing-and-operations layer that has to deliver actual playoff wins, not just process-correct decisions. The Sixers' statement language — "fresh start," "fallen short" — is the public version of a private calculation: when the star can't carry the team and the front office can't fix the star, someone has to answer for the gap.
Morey is highly likely to land another job. Philadelphia's question is harder: who do you hire when the roster is built, the coach is staying, the star is fragile, and the expectation is "win now"? Bob Myers's search will define the next five years of this franchise.
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