Kendall Marshall, Christian Wood, and the volume-shooting 76ers

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The Sixers made two notable — by their standards, anyway — pickups in free agency last weekend: Point guard Kendall Marshall and big man Christian Wood. Marshall, a 24-year-old former lottery pick out of UNC, will be playing on his fourth pro team in four years; he even spent some time with the Sixers' D-League affiliate the 87ers a couple seasons ago. Wood, a two-year standout at UNLV projected as a first-round talent, went undrafted in 2015 and played on the Rockets' Summer League team in Las Vegas.

The two players couldn't be much more different in player profile. Marshall is a talented and methodical playmaker and an above-average shooter, but he's one of the slowest and least athletic under-25 players in the league, particularly among his backcourt peers. Wood is a dynamic athlete with the physical potential to be a prototypical floor-stretching, rim-protecting modern NBA four, but with a questionable work ethic, a possibly selfish attitude, and a lack of clearly defined NBA-level skill. Merge the best qualities of the two and you might have a player of LeBron-like dominance, but combine the worst and you'd have a player who'd struggle to get off the bench in Div. III ball.

Despite their hardly separated-at-birth basketball histories, I do believe Marshall and Wood to be flipsides of the same talent-acquisition coin for the Sixers. That's because what the Sixers are looking for in free agency, above all else, is upside.

Now, too often, when hoops fans think of upside, they think exclusively of players like Wood, with the natural abilities to ball on the same level of speed, strength, and verticality as the Blake Griffins and Andre Drummonds of the basketball world. They think of dudes with all the bodily gifts in the world, who you could easily envision growing into All-Stars if they ever actually, y'know, learned how to play the game. They think of guys who have all the things you can't teach, because it seems so much easier to change a player's mentality than his physicality.

For the Sixers, though — especially at this stage of their roster development — upside means something very different. When the Sixers enter the free agency fray, they're not attempting to outbid or even out-pitch anyone. They're dealing almost strictly with the lowest-stakes players currently floating around the NBA's fringes, the players that don't really have anywhere else to go. For these guys, success isn't making an All-Star team, it's making a team, period, and sticking on it until Game 82. For these guys, upside isn't Kevin Durant, it's Hollis Thompson.

The Sixers aren't signing players like Marshall and Wood hoping to find the missing piece; any piece at all will be fine. And both Marshall and Wood have the potential to be a piece. Marshall has been an NBA contributor before, averaging eight points and nine assists a game with the Lakers in 2013-14, while shooting 40% from three. He'll likely never be able to defend well enough or get to the line frequently enough to be an elite point guard in this league, but he should be able to set up Jahlil Okafor in the post while spacing the floor for him and keeping the rest of their teammates happy. In the words of Sheriff Tom Bell, if he's not an NBA point guard, he'll do until the NBA point guard gets here.

Wood, same thing. As Liberty Ballers have already pointed out, the elevator pitch on the UNLV prospect — a four with shooting range and shot-blocking athleticism — would make him an ideal frontcourt partner for, say, a bulky, post-minded big man without a surfeit of ups. Whether he was acquired specifically with Okafor in mind or not, it's certainly easy to see a best-case scenario of Wood fitting like a dream next to him on this current Sixers roster.

Of course, the best-case scenario isn't the likeliest with either player. Chances are, Marshall's lack of athleticism and Wood's lack of NBA skills and smarts prove damning. If these Sixers are signing a free agent in September, it's because the great majority of the 29 other teams passed on them — maybe more than once —  and while Our Dark Lord Sam Hinkie may be smarter than your average GM, the NBA isn't stocked with nearly enough front-office dummies to think Hink could just steal a potential core player out from under the rest of their noses. If Marshall and Wood were still available this late in free agency, that means they're probably not very good bets to contribute at a high level to any team this NBA season.

But that's fine: The Sixers don't need to make good bets at this point — they're fine to take longshots, just as long as they take a lot of them. The Sixers have cycled through dozens of fungible role players over the last few years — Daniel Orton, Tim Frazier, Glenn Robinson III, Jarvis Varnado, Dewayne Dedmon, and Casper Ware, just to name a half-dozen — and they're lucky if one in a dozen ends up panning out. But you know what? That one hit makes the dozen misses justifiable. If Robert Covington — who very easily could've been one of those dirty dozen, but appeared last year to be the kind of sweet-shooting, ball-handling, position-versatile forward that just about every great NBA team needs one or two of on the roster — ends up being a contributor to the next good Sixers team, it'll all have been worth it. The Sixers aren't playing high-stakes baccarat here, they're playing quarter slots, and all they have to do is hit one $20 jackpot to make good on the previous 50 quarters they plugged in.

And that's all Kendall Marshall and Christian Wood are: Two more quarter-slot wagers in the hopes of hitting a low-grade payday. Don't get too attached to 'em: If one of them is still on the roster this time next year, it'll be a blessing, if they both are, it'll be a damn miracle. Chances are, by next season they'll be nothing but Sporcle answers.

But sign as many of them as the Sixers can hold — and with these two pickups pushing the training camp roster to 20, we're practically bursting at the seams with 'em — and see if one or two of them could end up being the fifth, sixth, or seventh best player on a contending team, or assets tradeable enough to be able to get those players in return. We'll get the top four guys in the draft, or through a blockbuster trade, or through much higher-stakes free agency, when Hinkie and the league entire deems the team ready. In the meantime, our free agents don't have to be useful players: for now, just having the upside of usefulness makes them shots worth taking.

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