Shams Charania reported Saturday morning that the 76ers are converting Tacko Fall’s Exhibit 10 deal into a two-way contract, handing him the final two-way spot in time for opening night. Fall is 30 years old, listed at 7-foot-6, and has not appeared in an NBA game since the 2021-22 season.
Tony Jones of The Athletic laid out the reasoning without dressing it up. Fall “has made a real impact in the locker room this preseason,” Jones wrote, and “he played well before going down with a hip strain.”
So a front office just told you it weighed presence as heavily as projection. That is a defensible way to spend this particular roster spot.
The Spot Was Never Going to Someone Better
Two-way contracts live at the margins. Philadelphia was not choosing between Fall and a rotation player. It was choosing between Fall and some 24-year-old G League big who also would not sniff a meaningful minute in a playoff race.
The frontcourt situation sharpens the case. Ariel Hukporti tore his right Achilles in the first preseason game against the Knicks and is out for the year. Adem Bona has been nursing a foot injury all preseason. If you need somebody who can occupy the paint for eight minutes in November, a 7-foot-6 center who led the CBA in blocks last season is not a punchline.
Fall has also not been coasting. Since Cleveland waived him in January 2022, he has worked through the Cleveland Charge, Xinjiang, Nanjing, the New Zealand Breakers and Ningbo. He averaged 11.4 points and 6.6 rebounds in 18 NBL games for New Zealand in 2024-25 and posted similar numbers back in China. He signed with the Sixers on September 1 and earned the deal in camp before the hip flared up.
The Cost of Being Wrong Is Almost Nothing
The objection writes itself. A team with Philadelphia’s injury history and its stated ambitions should spend every available slot chasing basketball value, and locker room chemistry is the thing executives cite when they cannot justify a move on talent.
Except a two-way contract is about the cheapest commitment in professional basketball. It does not occupy a standard 15-man roster spot, and the player on it is capped at 50 games of NBA availability anyway. The worst case here is that Fall gives the Sixers 60 garbage-time minutes and a good attitude. Teams burn far more valuable assets on far worse reasoning every October.
The better case is a veteran who has survived stops in China and New Zealand and nearly five years out of the league, and who, by multiple accounts, changed the temperature of the room. Philadelphia has spent several seasons as one of the more fragile organizations in the league, emotionally as much as physically. A guy who makes the building a better place to walk into every morning has value that never reaches a box score.
Fall will probably play fewer than 200 total minutes this season, most of them after the outcome is decided. If his real job is keeping a hard season survivable for everyone else, the Sixers paid a rounding error for it. Call that soft if you want. It is still the correct read on what a two-way slot is actually for.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.