It would be "star-hunting," as Brett Brown said, that would ultimately bring the Sixers a trip to the NBA Finals. As it turns out, star hunting may be the thing that keeps them from the finals.
Ultimately, the Sixers would have been better off skipping all of their top-end talent acquisition efforts in the offseason and more importantly, during the season, and focused on maintaining roster consistency with their non-star, cost controlled, role players, while adding personnel that would highlight the strengths of their two home-grown stars—Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons. It would have made them a better team this year and given them as much, if not more, opportunity to get better in the future.
When making the moves for Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris during the season, the Sixers indicated they were "going for it" this year by adding top end talent. The problem is, when you go through the history of the NBA, there are few, if any, teams who have made the sort of starting lineup changes the Sixers have during the season and gone on to the Finals. Not only were they trying to capitalize on a window that is bigger than they suggested (their two best players are 22 and 25 years old), their best players are so young that the window might not even be open yet. They traded just about every available asset they have for two players looking to be massively overpaid this summer for a chance at getting to the Finals this year, which may be smaller than if they hadn't made those trades.
There is one thing that the top teams in the league share that the Sixers do not, and that's very little roster turnover. Per Derek Bodner of The Athletic, there are ten teams who have less than 60-percent of their minutes played this year by players who were on the team last year. Of those ten teams, there is one team with a winning record, and one team going to the playoffs—the Sixers.
As well, while there is truth to "the more good players the better," there is certainly a case of diminishing returns when the core competencey of four of their five starters is scoring, the lone exception being Ben Simmons, who while has shown improvement off ball, is still of limited value. They've made themselves worse defensively as well.
The idea that the team that has the most stars wins is a distortion created by the LeBron James-led Heat and the current Warriors. All stars are not created equal, and that sort of top-heavy talent distribution is easier when you have the No. 1 player as James was at the time, or two of the top four, which the Warriors have now. Aside from the Warriors, just about every other top team in the NBA currently has competed using one or two stars, and depth to complement those players.
I will skip rehashing the entire Bryan Colangelo era (for once), and just take you back to last summer, and the waste of time that was the Sixers' pursuit of LeBron James. There was never any chance the Sixers would land James (some would have argued it was a bad move even if James did consider it), as his move to go to Los Angeles to play for the Lakers was likely decided the year before, and definitely decided by the time the Sixers went out to meet with what it turned out to be someone other than James himself. The pursuit of James, which had to be for our benefit as fans (because it certainly didn't help the team) was a waste of time, headspace and resources.
Let's say instead of pursuing James, the Sixers signed Trevor Ariza to the same one-year, $15 million deal that the Suns signed him to. If you want, throw in another few million for good weather. Keep everything else the same to start the season, even go through the Markelle Fultz exercise, which would have failed on its own.
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Imagine the Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris trades never happened, and instead maybe they pick Austin Rivers up off the scrap heap, and outbid the Bucks for Nikola Mirotic at the trade deadline. There are a million other moves I can suggest with the benefit of hindsight, but these all seem fair and possible and not the result of too much armchair quarterbacking.
Taking a team that won 52 games last season, and adding to it while keeping the core together would have improved the team defensively. Keeping Covington, and adding Ariza and Rivers, would have given the team three options to stick on point-of-attack guards, rather than their current number of zero options. It would have allowed the Sixers to keep both future assets and current, cost-controlled contributors in Covington, Dario Saric and Landry Shamet. They would have had a full roster, consistency and flexibility, and still had their two best players. Instead, they've got a thin roster that's considering playoff minutes for Zhair Smith and Shake Milton, and a starting lineup that's played ten games together.
To top it all off, both Butler and Harris are unrestricted free-agents, and it would seem that the most likely path to keeping them comes from the ability to give them both contracts that are bigger than their actual value.
The Sixers have a chance at talenting their way to the NBA Finals, it could definitely happen. But it's hard to imagine that this path was their most efficient option.
