Will Cheeks Follow King Out the Door?

Billy King was fired on Tuesday; will Maurice Cheeks make it to the end of the week? We'll have to wait and see, because on his first day on the job, new Sixers president Ed Stefanski gave no indication what other changes might be in store aside from telling reporters he's "evaluating top to bottom. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Cheeks, who is in the final season of his contract, told reporters that while he had talked to Stefanski only briefly, he received no assurance that his job was safe.

"I don't have an answer to why it happened. That's not my position," Cheeks said, when asked about King's firing.

"It happened, and now we have to move on. The only thing I can do is try to go out there every day and control what I can control, and that's trying to get our team better. That's basically all I can do."

The fact that Cheeks is in the last year of his contract makes me think he's probably not long for the Sixers. The Sixers have absolutely no chance of doing anything this year, so the coaching staff's primary obligation should be to prepare the team for the future.

But as an impending free agent, Cheeks knows there's a good chance he'll be looking for work next summer, whether he stays on board with the Sixers for the rest of the season or not. Will his emphasis be winning a few extra games now or developing the roster for the next guy to take over? Unless he gets an enthusiastic vote of confidence in the form of an extension, I think it's only natural and probably unavoidable that his priorities will be slightly different, which might prompt Stefanski to make a change.