James Harden on Joel Embiid: “We’re both at a high level to where we’ll figure it out. Joel does everything on the floor. So we got guys on our team that are very smart, we communicate and we have coaching that is going to put is in positions to be successful. Listen here, they have something great already going on, I’m just here to contribute."

Daryl Morey on trading first-rounders in the Harden trade: "We’re in the window of Joel, James and Tobias right now. And making sure that Tyrese Maxey is here, making sure Matisse Thybulle is here, those were the big priorities. We wanted to give up nothing but you have to give up something to make a trade and get a Hall-of-Famer and a player that can put us into a different tier of competing."

James Harden still has the opportunity to opt in to the final year of his contract and said that he's going to do that when he's eligible to: "Everything [at the deadline] happened so fast, I just wanted to get here and take my time and most importantly focus on the end game, and that’s winning a championship."

Some takeaways from James Harden's presser, the first is that he called the Sixers a "perfect fit." Harden: "Originally, I was going through everything I was going through in Houston, Philly was my first choice, it just didn’t happen. The details, I don’t really want to get into the Brooklyn situation, I just knew for a very long time this was a perfect fit."

Simmons says he had “a ton” of friends in the Sixers’ organization, so he wasn’t saying the franchise as a whole was responsible for how he felt.

Ben Simmons says there were a lot of things that happened internally in Philadelphia that led to his trade. Asked specifically what went wrong there, he said, “if I knew, I’d tell you everything.”