Despite slow start to season, Sixers could yet be ‘royalty’
PHILADELPHIA >> Brett Brown has coached in the NBA long enough to know when to bluff. Last weekend in Brooklyn was not one of those times.
“We are not,” the Sixers’ coach would say, after a clumsy loss to the Nets, “among the Eastern Conference royalty.”
As any basketball coach knows, a well-used timeout can work. And Brown, confronted not only with the usual familiar Philadelphia basketball illuminati but with the hovering correspondents from the media capital of the world, knew at that point that it was best not to keep pressing. His team had just been run out of a half-empty building by the Losers of Flatbush. So, he’d retreat, all the better to regroup.
“It was a poor performance,” he said. “I’m not going to over-react to it.”
The candor, which by way of contrast is not always evident in a particular ballpark just to the northeast of the Wells Fargo Center, was useful. Indeed, it was perfect. Why over-react to one clumsy loss, in the business end of a back-toback, on the road, in November?
“That’s not who we are,” Brown would say. “That’s not who we are.”
He was right. The Sixers are better than they were in Brooklyn. They are better than their 7-5 record reflects. And they can be among Eastern Conference royalty, this season, not next. “That’s a badge we want,” Brown said. Among the most misunderstood, misrepresented and over-relied-upon clichés in sports is something Bill Parcells once was heard to mumble, that mouthful about being what your record says you are. At the end of a professional sports season, that is true. But it’s goofy to accept it before the schedule has a chance to be accurately reflected.
The Sixers do have five losses. Two, though, have been at royal palaces in Boston and Toronto. There was a loss in Milwaukee, which is also on the path to royalty, and one in Detroit, when Ben Simmons didn’t play. The thud in Brooklyn was unacceptable. But it was chased three nights later with a 100-94 triumph in Indianapolis against a good Pacers team. In it, the Sixers played with intensity at both ends, challenged shooters, rebounded with determination, ran, showed scoring balance and enjoyed help from the bench.
So on a rare Sunday when the Eagles didn’t play, the Sixers were atrocious in an outlier game in Brooklyn, thus spreading area-wide angst. Yet they quietly have won three of their last four. Should they win Friday against visiting Charlotte, which will be an underdog, that would put them at just ahead of a 50-win pace. And they have yet to enjoy that return visit from the Celtics or Raptors, caught as they’ve been with a cruel early schedule.
“I don’t even get too caught up in the reality of that,” Brown said. “That is daunting to start a year. And this league swallows you up in regards to the pace of it. When you look at the schedule from the start of the year, I am kind of numb to it. After 18 years, I am truly numb to it. I think it all plays out as it should.
“You have played the heavyweights and royalty in the East right out of the gate. But it all balances out, I think.”
If there is a rampaging impatience about the Sixers, it was self-inflicted. They lost for years, with no regard to their professionalism, in order to be ready at some point to play for a championship. Before Training Camp Practice No. 1, Brown announced that the goal this season was to play in the NBA Finals. Neither he nor the players are retreating from that challenge.
There were reasons for the early sputter. Dario Saric, who tends to mix in the odd 10-game slump, began the season slowly; the rebuilding process ultimately will not work if the 2017 Rookie of the Year runner-up doesn’t at some point make it into the All-Star Game conversation. Brown is making himself find out about Markelle Fultz, even using the second-year pro at off-guard to start the game. That experiment has been clumsy. Robert Covington has been inconsistent. Simmons still doesn’t shoot from beyond the shadow of the rim. Wilson Chandler and Mike Muscala, the effective replacements for Marco Belinelli and Ersan Ilyasova, have been too injured to supply consistent help.
But as he will, Saric began to stir against the Pacers, going for 18 points and seven rebounds, depositing four of six three-point shots. And Fultz is showing that he can have value as a midgame, backup point guard, with baseline-to-baseline burst and the ability with his long arms to be a sneaky disturbance to would-be opposing offensiverebounders. Covington was a plus-18 in Indy. And Landry Shamet is proving that good scouting can sniff out a productive player in the draft’s first round even without dumping games to worm into the lottery.
Mix in the early consistency of Joel Embiid, which has been matched only by Hall of Famers, and there it all is: The reason why Vegas, rarely caught in transition, has suggested a 54-win season.
There will be opportunities later for the Sixers to make necessary improvements. The Feb. 7 trade deadline is not close, but in that goofy league, the buyers and the sellers are quickly revealed. Elton Brand will buy something that should help.
The Sixers are not yet among Eastern Conference royalty. There is no reason to try and bluff that they are. But they are a very good team, one capable of uncorking double-figure winning streaks, one with an MVP candidate. And that gives them a good chance to win their way there, no matter what their earliest results suggest.