Brown-Colangelo pairing showed stress before Twitter blowup
PHILADELPHIA » Brett Brown delivered his message in public, on TV, in arenas crammed with 20,000 people. “Still Balling” delivered a response in a burner social-media account.
For that, the Sixers were stuck in a sloppy, slippery mud hole for days, waiting to do what they know they need to do: Announce that Brown has agreed to a three-year contract extension, a well-deserved reward for a splendidly coached season.
They were stuck there because a report on the sports website “The Ringer” has made it clear that any continued partnership between the Sixers’ head coach and their general manager cannot work. They were stuck because Brown wants to coach winning basketball, while every indication is that GM Bryan Colangelo’s driving interest is only in his own professional reputation.
Finally Thursday, in a typically side-door fashion, the Sixers made the contract extension public, but only in a press release, with canned quotes from Brown and Colangelo. That was just as well, because it would have been senseless to sit them both at the same press-conference table, given all recent goingson.
During the postseason, Brown delivered the message that he had no further interest in participating in Colangelo’s weird experiment to
force stardom on Markelle Fultz. He did that the way all head coaches do: He sat Fultz on his bench for an entire series against the Celtics, through five games competitive enough that any No. 1 overall draft pick theoretically should have been able to help win.
But Fultz can’t play at an NBA level. And while Brown is too professional to have said that out loud, the ancient actions-vs.words bout is never difficult to score. Brown sat Fultz. That was his message to the Sixers; he was telling them that Colangelo made a franchisedamaging error by trading up to acquire the rights to draft the flawed combo guard. And it came through clear to Colangelo, or somebody close to Colangelo tweeting under the name “Still Balling.”
According to The Ringer report, “Still Balling even accused Brown of sidelining Fultz in order to sabotage the team. ‘I think that it would shorten Brett’s rope on ‘why we lost’ alibi,’ the account wrote in a response to a tweet from Sixers announcer Marc Zumoff. So Brett would rather keep him out.”
Even if Colangelo had not been alleged this week to have used up to five sloppy Twitter accounts to do everything from characterize Joel Embiid as a “toddler” to leak medical information about Jahlil Okafor, he was trending toward taking the Fultz disaster personally. Evidently, according to the camouflaged tweets, he or someone in his camp take plenty personally. And that’s why the Sixers Thursday rolled through a second day of an independent investigation into Colangelo’s alleged cyberrants before dripping out the news about Brown.
Brown was never Colangelo’s guy. He wasn’t even Colangelo’s father’s guy, for in his brief reign in the Sixers’ front office, it was Jerry Colangelo who’d made Mike D’Antoni sit next to Brown on the bench for half a year. Because the Sixers’ rebuilding process had forced him to accept a catastrophic win-loss record, Brown was forced to tolerate that professional insult. Eventually, D’Antoni moved on to Houston, the Sixers began to play better, Bryan replaced Jerry, and all seemed to coexist. But rare is the situation in any major sport, pro or college, where the individual picking the coach doesn’t eventually want his own selection.
That Brown would come to the point where he had one season left on his contract was itself ridiculous. He should have had the extension well before it had such urgency. He should have been the NBA’s Coach of the Year. His offenses were entertaining, bordering on glorious. His players defended with passion. And he won 52 games, a 24-game improvement over the previous season, all while cultivating almost a high-school-team camaraderie among multimillionaire pros.
Though Colangelo had said all of the predictably
correct things about his coach, he somehow waited until Brown technically had become a lame duck before arranging the new deal. The Ringer’s report hinted at why. Team Colangelo was not sold on a coach unwilling to go along with the scheme to show that Fultz was a better player than Jayson Tatum.
There was nothing Colangelo could do to stop the Brown extension. Josh Harris, who routinely accompanies his head coach into postgame press conferences and grins through them after victories, knows he owes Brown support as payback for all those forced years of losing. But “Still Balling” believes Brown sat Fultz for some reason other than that he had better players. If that’s the spin from Colangelo’s posse, then he has
to be as far removed as Fultz from the Sixers’ serious plans.
Whenever the Sixers learn the results of their investigation of Colangelo’s alleged underground propaganda machine, they’ll have options. If it is proven to be as reckless as it seems, they can fire Colangelo and win back their scorned players. If it is not, they can thank him for his effort, pay him off, and move on.
Eventually, they can publicly renew their vows to Brown and recover some lost public-perception ground. Eventually, they can do it like they should, on TV, in public, in front of everyone.