McConnell or Simmons? Seeing is believing
McCaffery: Sixers turn to Simmons, but they shouldn’t forget what McConnell has done >>
The more T.J. McConnell did last season to help win a basketball game, the closer Brett Brown knew he was coming to be trapped.
The more McConnell dove for a 50-50 ball, with every clever pass he made, with each time the assist column on the stat sheet sparkled, with each late differencemaking shot the point guard downed, the more his coach understood that he soon would have to recite an organizational dogma. So he did. He looked straight ahead late last season, in the midst of one of many flurries of McConnell basketball excellence, and he chose policy over anything else. He did not hedge.
No matter what, Brown indicated, Ben Simmons was going to start the next season as his point guard … and he would have that job for a long time.
“We feel — I feel — the need to try that immediately,” Brown said. “Yes, I do. I do. And in my eyes, we are going to try that.”
It could be the best plan. For the Sixers, who clowned around for an entire season just to be able to draft Ben Simmons, it had better be the best plan. It should be the best plan. Just about every basketball scout believes it will be the best plan. Chances are, it will be the best plan.
But it doesn’t have to be the best plan. Yet that’s what happens when an organization slips its professional pride beneath a flimsy instruction manual. It becomes hypnotized. It begins to doubt what it is seeing, and instead begins to recite what it has been made to believe. It starts to value an idea over success.
As the 76ers graduate from comical to competitive — and their offseason has given them a substantial push — they soon must trust what is, not just what the script had suggested. They must do what they can to win games, not to develop young players or build a program or, in the worst case, insist on proving that their rebuilding process was f lawless.
Brown did attempt to pair the organization’s back-to-back No. 3 overall draft choices in the same frontcourt, but quickly realized that Joel Embiid and Jahlil Okafor could not play together. He used Nerlens Noel when he could. But when he couldn’t, well, that was too bad for Nerlens Noel. So the Sixers’ coach has shown that he will stray from the process. And that’s why it will be fascinating to see how long he can keep McConnell bottled while trying to prove to the rest of the world what apparently only Australia (and certainly not the SEC, NCAA, LSU or NBA) knows: That Simmons is already in the lobby at Springfield, just waiting for his plaque to be engraved.
Simmons is 6-10; McConnell is 6-2. Simmons was the consensus No. 1 overall draft choice; McConnell was an NBA walk-on. McConnell has remarkable court vision; Simmons has shown glimpses of legendary court vision.
But while McConnell is not a special shooter, Simmons has some kind of outside-shooting phobia. And McConnell battles, while Simmons bolted school before LSU could consider an NIT invitation, then sat out an entire season with an injury that should have taken three or four months to heal. And McConnell was sixth in the NBA in steals last season, eighth in assists and a proven end-of-thegame handful for opponents. Can Simmons duplicate that?
There will be plenty of opportunity for both. There are 48 nightly minutes, the occasional injury, the change-ofpace nature of the sport. If the Sixers are lucky, they have two very good young point guards. Good teams are deep. But playing-time distribution is not the issue. The issue is the danger of being so invested in an idea, in a marketing ploy or in a process that has become a professional sickness.
By training camp last year, any suggestion that McConnell would have marginalized veteran Sergio Rodriguez before the All-Star break would have been ridiculed. But players win opportunity. McConnell — a majorcollege force, by the way, at Arizona, not some feel-good novelty act — is one of those players. He has shown it with every finish at the rim, every flawless execution of a late-game play, every dive across the sideline to prevent a ball from leaking out of bounds.
Simmons, though, is not Rodriguez. He is a sales lure, a brand, a reason for the networks to reserve premium time for the Sixers, an idea, a concept, a belief. So he is going to play. Plenty.
“I think it’s something that I doubt you would say, ‘Oh, that didn’t work,’ and you just move on quickly,” Brown said last season. “I think there has to be a body of work that you judge him on. That’s my best answer.”
The 76ers will be deep enough to compete for a home-court-advantage first-round playoff spot in 2017-2018. That is their first real reward from their process. Embiid should be an AllStar. Dario Saric can be one, too. Robert Covington keeps improving. J.J. Redick gives Brown the shooter he was begging for, even if $23 million for one season is pricey. Markelle Fultz has a well-rounded game and a sharpened work ethic.
It can all work. And it can work quickly. But that will require the head coach to do what it takes to win games and not just to front for a theory. Brown has shown that willingness. For too many reasons, though, it will be tougher this time.