Brown confident of a favorable day of judgment
Brett Brown never denied that the moment would come when all of it, and there has been plenty, would be his to own. He prepared for it. He embraced it. And right about now, had the NBA not been in a lengthy pause amid a global health concern, it was going to be coming close.
“Judgement day,” the Sixers coach said.
It’s how it works in sports, always at the end of any game, always in a coaching career and, in the case of the 76ers, at the end of a process. The score will be filed. There will be a winner. There will be a loser. There will be consequences. And in a season that could have been his most fulfilling in Philadelphia, Brown was convinced all of it would have been proven worthwhile.
“I’ve been with you in this city for seven years,” Brown said Friday during
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“And here we are.”
The Sixers are 39-26, sixth in Eastern Conference. But they are 29-2 at home, have had time to return Ben Simmons to basketball readiness after a back injury and, when the season resumes, will be in a position to complete the job they have been built to do. They were constructed to thrive in the playoffs, having shed the inhouse success-spoiler that is Jimmy Butler, added career winner Al Horford and, at the trade deadline, acquiring veterans Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson III.
Brown believed in the Sixers’ championship-readiness in training camp and he still believes it two months after the NBA took a timeout while a medical curve was flattened. More, he is convinced that once the league returns, he will have the players and the roster health to provide the proof. He believes he and his assistants have used the
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“So against that kind of backdrop, if the season comes in, I’m excited, confident and comfortable that we are going to hit the ground running,” Brown said. “What makes that sentence whole is the players’ responsibility to come in with a fitness fix so we can pull this off.
“We do not want to use this at all as an excuse. The mission has been and will be to hunt for a championship. In many ways, I feel that carpet has been pulled from this team.”
It has been pulled from every coach. Yet not all NBA teams are in the Sixers’ position, which is just seasoned enough to be postseason-ready, just young enough to be championship-hungry and just weary enough after a six-year runup of often unprofessional basketball to have the disposition to get it done.
“Think about this number: Only 19 times out of 65 games did we have our starters,” Brown said, aware of the Sixers’ injury strife. “The injuries to Ben and Joel (Embiid) and J-Rich (Josh Richardson) are significant.
“And so, as it sits, I don’t believe our season is complete at all. We have more to give.”
Whatever the Sixers give, it will be a function of Embiid’s readiness. Brown tried to give assurances Friday that his center is determined to return at an optimum playing weight, but the Sixers’ credibility account long has been empty on that. It’s possible. But like everything else in the last seven years, it must be shown.
Though Elton Brand and Josh Harris technically hadn’t said it, they’d given sufficient indications that this is the spring when Brown must prove he can navigate a good team deep into the postseason. Written
or not, Brown effectively signed off on that when he announced in the preseason that he had a roster capable of winning the Eastern Conference.
After being made to lose for so long, and then being made to be the company front man for it all, he deserves the opportunity to prove that he is right. For that, Brown is hoping, like so many, that Adam Silver will find a healthy way to finish an NBA season that could be the Sixers’ most satisfying in 20 years.
“I think this team was built for the playoffs,”
Brown said. “Like any team, you’ve got some non-fortunate injury situations. We get that we needed to be better on the road. We weren’t. We were dominant at home. And I thought that somewhere in the middle everything was pointing to us landing the plane, getting good health and letting that environment be judgment day.
“So I dump all my energy into, ‘Let’s do everything we can.’ And I feel very confident and respectfully cocky that we’ve done good work.”
Brown has been a good coach, surviving the process years, winning 103 regular-season games over the past two seasons, and developing the Sixers into a team capable this season of winning 29 of 31 home games. It’s his turn to be confident, respectfully or otherwise.
“Take the team that we have, the work that we’ve put in, and let that be the judgment day,” he said. “Let that environment be ‘youdid-or-you-didn’t’ type of stuff. And that’s how I approach it.”
Give him some time, give his team some reasonable health, and give him a chance. From there, Brown gladly will own the rest.