‘Business’ trip to London might cost surging Sixers
CAMDEN, N.J. » The 76ers were booked for a Monday evening charter flight to England, where for the next week their every move will be scripted. Except one. For that, Brett Brown doesn’t know whether to be excited by a fun opportunity or to bristle against a potential problem.
His team playing well, his team healthy, his team back to .500 after a recent struggle, Brown has made it clear all season that he’d heard Josh Harris’ draftlottery-night wail. That came when the owner declared that he never again wanted his basketball fortunes dictated by the random drawing of ping-pong balls. Understanding that front-office demand, Brown has acknowledged at every turn that the Sixers need to, want to and expect to make the playoffs. More, he has said more than once that the Sixers’ postseason chances could be decided by one game.
The game they play Thursday, against the Celtics, in London Town?
That could be the one. That’s because in the Sixers’ operation’s never-ending determination to place image above success, it will be a neutral-site “home” game.
Let the rest of the NBA hopefuls, the Celtics included, play their full 41 games at home. The Sixers will attempt to crawl into that eighth Eastern Conference playoff spot by playing 40.
Revolutions have begun over less.
“You think about it,” Brown would admit Monday, after a get-away practice at the training complex. “You’d be lying if you didn’t. But you’re a good soldier and you put the organization and the sport somewhere in the forefront. And this has been decided by people extremely conscious of what’s going on.
“We’re all in. I’m not going to cry about it.”
Among those who made the decision was Harris, who owns a soccer team in England and has an urge to expand a sports empire well beyond a first-round playoff series in the spring of 2018. Harris was generous enough to invite the players’ and coaches’ families on the excursion, but, just a guess, the first seat on that plane would be claimed by a photographer.
Somebody has to take the mandatory publicity shot of the Sixers doing the Abbey Road walk, with you-know-who going shoeless.
“Last time I was there, I just fell in love with the city in general,” said Joel Embiid, and, yes, that would have to be him. “Just walking around, it’s beautiful. Beautiful women. So I had a great time.”
Pro athletes can find their way into trouble anywhere, so Brown is not going to sweat the Fleet Street paparazzi catching a shot of one of his eligible players squiring a British supermodel. But unlike some other NBA excursions, this will be a regular-season obligation, not a preseason gimmick. And considering that the season is close to half over, each outcome in the second half will at least feel more vital.
“It’s a business trip,” J.J. Redick said.
The players have their business. But the marketing department has its business, too. And in both fields, there are winners and losers.
“We’re going to enjoy the experience as an organization, as a big family,” Brown said. “There will be dinners. There will be interaction. I don’t worry that people think we’re going to Disneyland and it’s a holiday. I don’t fear that at all.”
The Sixers have been on a thrill ride, winners of their last four and five of their last six. Given everything, they have not looked better during the Trust the Process Era, that 10-win January of 2017 included. They are maximizing the skills of Embiid and Ben Simmons, have benefitted from Redick’s shooting and are about as healthy as any pro-sports reasonably team can be. And they are doing that because Embiid, immediately after signing that $148,000,000 contract, did what all such well-compensated NBA franchisefaces do: Run the place. Already having big-timed the sports-science department into waiving that goofy minutes restriction, Embiid is hinting that he soon, too, will declare himself ready to play back-to-back games. And that’s how it’s been going for the Sixers. Embiid is flexing. Simmons is improving. Brown is showing what he can do with a full and healthy lineup. And a tidy playoffpush has begun.
It’s why the timing is so poor for such a schedule disturbance.
“I’ve seen the travel schedule,” said Brown, who has deep international basketball coaching experience, and who coached Australia in the 2012 London Olympics. “There is a challenge of promotion stuff and representing our organization and representing the NBA. But we have studied it and looked at it with sports science and how we are going to practice, when we are going to sleep, what time we are going to practice, those sort of things.
“In my world, historically, it was an 18-hour flight to Sydney and a seven-and-a-half-hour flight to London. We just got back from Portland. And this is not that much different. So we are going to enjoy it.”
They will try to enjoy the theater and the fish and the chips and the nighttime spectacle of the Tower Bridge.
Just check back after the game Thursday, or better still after the playoff seedings drop in the spring, to learn how much fun they had ... and just what kind of business they’d settled.
Contact Jack McCaffery @jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery.