Back to basics, games without fans could work

Elton Brand played 1,000 NBA games, then played 58 more, in buildings crammed with fans, in some where the upper decks were vacant.

He played for Duke, in the Final Four and on quiet summer tours. He played in AAU tournaments and in driveways, in domes and in high school gyms, in All-Star Games and elimination games.

The awards, and there were plenty, he earned. The bruises, and there were even more, he never forgot. Mostly, he always remembered where they came from, and why he knows that a spectatorfree NBA has the potential not just to entertain, but to reveal basketball greatness. The for-real-for-real kind, as someone once might have said.

“It’s interesting,” Brand was saying Tuesday on a conference call, the conversation spinning toward the possibility of pro basketball being contested for a while in empty arenas. “I’ve seen practices that are brutal. You just go at it and bang and sweat. Blood. You compete.”

The NBA hasn’t provided the spectacle of the world’s best players competing since March, just when a virus was becoming a pandemic. When it all resumes, and the Sixers are operating as best they can within the restrictions to prepare for that to happen this season, there is the chance that the earliest games will be played in front of no fans, perhaps at neutral sites. If that means the only sounds being picked up by the TV microphones are of squeaking sneakers, referees’ whistles and the clicking of the shot clock, it doesn’t mean that it will be any less compelling.

It might even be better.

“I think there will be competitive juices, once everything is on the line, whether that’s regular season, whether that’s playoffs, and especially if you get to the championship,” Brand said, “Regardless of this, we are going to compete and we going to be ready to compete, even in the summer.”

Brand was prepped for the press questioning Tuesday, following the game plan, as he always did as a player. The general manager was quick to stress that a return of the Sixers and the NBA would wait until safety was certain, and confidently brandished an Adam Silver phrase to prove he was serious: “It will come down to data, not dates.”

The one thing he did not say, however, was that the season was over. Instead, he mentioned how Brett Brown is preparing daily, watching film, diving into scouting reports. The Sixers have 17 regular-season games to play, but if they are shoved directly into the playoffs, the standings will send them to Boston.

“We’re talking about the Celtics as if that could be an opponent,” Brand said. “And Brett and his staff have gotten ready for other teams, in case there is a regular season and the odds change. But we’ve done deep dives.

“I’ve said it a number of times: As a fan, I want to see it. I want to see this team in the playoffs. That’s what we were built for.”

It’s why Brand effectively exchanged Jimmy Butler for Al Horford in the offseason, hoping Horford’s professionalism would increase in value during the playoffs. Yet in the playoffs-mattermost approach to basketball, where stars are load-managed at inconvenient times only to be fresher later, there has been one widely acknowledged baseline: Teams would try to win as often as possible to maximize their number of postseason home games. And no team has been better at home this season than the Sixers, who are 29-2. And since they have been 1024 at home, there was a persistent and fair question: Why? The only answer that has made sense was the one Brown will offer at every opportunity: There is no better homecourt advantage than the Wells Fargo Center, which has been filled to capacity for every game with loud, knowledgeable and championshipstarved fans.

All of that, then, would go away if the NBA playoffs were contested in echo chambers. Then again, some of the best basketball ever played has been in the relative silence of a practice facility. It’s why Brown always says, the “gym” speaks to him, not the coliseum.

“Sometimes, I have seen guys foul players on our own team,” Brand said. laughing. “It’s like, ‘Why don’t you foul the opponent like that?’”

That’s basketball at its purest. Yet it’s not pro basketball at its purist, for the only reason it exists is to coax ticket-buyers into swiping their credit cards. But the ball has been bouncing free for more than a month, and the NBA has to dive on the floor to avoid a critical turnover. If that means that for one season playoff games will be played strictly for TV, then better those courtside microphones capture players screaming, “ouch” after being elbowed away from a traffic rebound than for them to be wasted on dueling timeout hosts to try to out-scream one another.

A virtual shirts-vs.skins tournament, with the winners keeping the court, might not make for a bad TV show at all.

“I think we’ll be prepared and we will get the juices flowing,” Brand said. “Of course, this has to be led by the league office and by the NBAPA (Players Association). It has to be safe to play.”

The players, of course, must be roundly protected from illness. As for being protected from the additional hard foul, that will never happen once the venues become more intimate.

The greatest players in the world, and Brand once was one, know that better than most.