Improving landscape inspiring added optimism
PHILADELPHIA » Joel Embiid, his injury history public, has been available to the Sixers for 63 of their 74 games. Ben Simmons, out all of last season, has played 73 times. So has Dario Saric.
The Cleveland Cavaliers, even with LeBron James having a typically splendid season, are fading. Markelle Fultz is back, and in-season additions are helping, and the Wells Fargo Center has provided a robust advantage to the Sixers. J.J. Redick has been worth the $23 million, one-year bet.
For all of those reasons, and because he has been around basketball for a lifetime, Brett Brown has come to accept a new reality: This season, not any season in the future, may be setting up for his 76ers to win a championship. This one? “I feel that we can really surprise people,” Brown said Wednesday, before a game against the New York Knicks. “There is not one team that I am intimidated by. And we’ve beaten them. It’s not because I am making stuff up. And my team, our team, knows that.”
Brown has been amping-up such noises for the past couple of weeks, openly vowing to “recalibrate” postseason expectations, boasting that the Sixers will be a matchup handful in any playoff series. Yet he has also stressed that because he still rarely practices, Embiid’s most productive days are in the future, that Simmons will only get better, that Fultz has yet to show what he eventually will show in the NBA. As for guarantees, there are none. And it is not a given that Embiid ever will be as available, or the conference will ever be as open, or the Sixers ever be as hot as they have been since Christmas.
“We have to keep them healthy, we have to keep them spirit-cocky and we have to play good basketball,” Brown said. “And I think we are ticking boxes right. Then you inherit Ersan (Ilyasova) and you sort of inherit Marco Belinelli, and they fit perfectly into what we’re doing. Then here comes Markelle. And things feel good right now. There is momentum.” There is momentum. And there is opportunity that the NBA isn’t always accommodating enough to provide. It’s why the Sixers are so determined to win a home-court advantage for one playoff round … then take their chances.
“It’s huge for us,” Simmons said. “I think the stat was like 76 percent of home-court teams move on to the next round. It’ll be huge if we get that. Because we have the best fan base in the NBA.”
That fan base has been waiting through a process that has provided four repulsive seasons and, finally, one that rightly has inspired them to fill the Wells Fargo Center on a nightly basis. And the process does allow for continued growth, with cap room about to open, allowing for a full dive into the freeagent waters.
But Brown knows he has to be careful not to rely too much on the future, not in a year when all of his star players are relatively healthy and the NBA East is essentially an open heat.
Of course, in order for parade chairs to be arranged, there is a West to be dealt with, too. But the Sixers would only have to play one of those teams and upsets could happen on that side of the bracket.
“We think the future is bright,” Brown said. “We realize it is more promising than we may have thought a month ago, as far as how far we can go. But my mindset with the guys is that we can do what we want for the most part. Nothing should surprise us.
“We have enough firepower in this room to cause some disturbances in the eco-system of the East.”
And beyond ...?