McCaffery: 76ers already preparing for the postseason
PHILADELPHIA » Except for one thing, the one thing he notices every June, there is nothing more about basketball likely to amaze Brett Brown.
He’s seen it all, from championships to lottery nights, state-side and abroad, the dunks, the passes, the looping three-pointers that seem to be drawn into baskets by magnets. He’s won, he’s lost, he’s celebrated, he’s lamented. He’s been entertained by the high school team his father coached, the Olympic team he coached, the AAU teams that his son enjoys.
He’s coached Hall of Famers. He’s coached over-achievers. He has seen Ben Simmons go from one foul line to the other with two dribbles. He watched 16 point guards try that in one season and just hoped they didn’t trip over the three-point line on dribble No. 5.
Yet, there is that one thing … the thing that startles him every June.
“Our season would end in early April,” Brown has said, over and over for four years. “Then you watch the playoffs. And all those weeks later, they are still playing. Still. That’s a different situation. Different.”
It takes conditioning and patience. It takes experience and will. It takes dozens of yards of ankle tape. It takes weeks of sleepless nights. But for an NBA championship, it takes the awareness that all of that will be necessary.
Four times, Brown rode shotgun as Gregg Popovich guided the San Antonio Spurs to championships, playing as hard and as smart and as wheeze-free in June as they had in February. So he knows what it takes, physically and strategically, to play when the weather and the stakes are hot.
“I’m so privileged to have spent 12 years in a row in the postseason,” Brown was saying Saturday, before the Sixers would play the Orlando Magic. “I saw how they would guard Tony Parker, who really struggled shooting. We saw how they would double Tim Duncan. I think there are some lessons to be learned with Ben and Joel (Embiid) in those two areas, especially.”
So there it was, clear and, as Brown often rules, fair. The Sixers are preparing for the playoffs, not just by winning games, but by plotting out what it will all look like six games into a seven-game series, on nights when elimination is at stake, on long spring road trips, with the pressure on to eventually make like Jason Kelce.
At this point, they must think that way. They have won their way onto the preliminary bracket, and their remaining schedule is reasonable. Simply, if the Sixers do not reach the playoffs, which was the stated preseason goal of both Brown and Josh Harris, it will be because they were not ready for that moment.
For that, the readiness already has begun.
“All of that is on my mind,” Brown said. “It’s deeper than practicing and so on. It’s, ‘How do you take whatever opportunity that you have and make it work?’ What do you do before a game? What do you do on the road in a breakfast meeting because you can’t go to the gym?”
The Sixers may or may not be ready for the mental challenge that a possible 28-game postseason will present. They are young, relatively. They have not had that experience. But if they have had time for nothing else in Brown’s four years, it has been for their sports-science department to so condition the athletes that they could play postseason doubleheaders and not require sweat towels.
Simmons played one regular season of college basketball and not a second more, LSU blowing off the NIT two years ago after an SEC Tournament stumble. He sat out all of last season with a broken foot. And more than once this season, Brown has reminded that his point guard is young and on a work schedule unlike any he’d experienced.
“I’m good,” Simmons said Saturday, about the grind. “I’m fine.” His secret? “I can’t tell you,” he said, laughing.
He looks fine. All the Sixers look fine, except for those rookies with crooked shoulders. And they will make the playoffs. Then? “I am so proud of the identity that we have,” Brown said. “It’s not like we come into this thing and it is, ‘Who are we?’ We play fast; we’re fourth or fifth. We pass the ball; we’re first. We get who we are offensively. This whole world is driven, to me, through defense; we’re fourth. And there is no mystery how I want to coach this team or how we want to play, especially in this city.”
They have played that way in the regular season.
But what will they do when they have to beat a good team four times in 14 days?
“I know how I would guard us,” Brown said. “I know completely how I would guard us.” Care to share? “No,” he said, grinning. “I’m not telling you that.”
Maybe in April. Maybe in May. Maybe, amazingly, in June.