Brown doesn’t feel he had chance to be shown at his best

Through seven years of coaching torment, some accepted, some unfortunate, Brett Brown was never willing to blame anyone for disappointment.

By Sunday, when a 110106 loss to the Boston Celtics squeezed his Sixers out of the NBA playoffs, Brown would absolve one more individual from immediate culpability. Himself.

Not that Brown didn’t raise his hand and admit that in the 2020 season he did not adequately maximize the pieces he was given by Elton Brand. He did. But when asked if he’d really had the opportunity to be shown at his best, Brown offered a telling response.

“Brett Brown or the team?” he asked, when questioned about the opportunity to be shown at his professional best.

Brett Brown.

“No.”

Asked if he would elaborate, Brown said, “No. And thank you for asking the question.”

That is a question that will remain in play for as long as it takes Elton Brand, Josh Harris or both to decide whether to make a coaching change or bring Brown back for Year No. 8. But in seven years, playoffs included, Brown was 221345.

Understanding that he was forced to endure a controversial process that required losing for three years, that record is necessarily warped. But Brown has often said he understands how the NBA works, and it rarely works to bring back a coach of a team expected to produce something better than a first-round playoff exit.

“This season, to me, was riddled with an amazing number of injuries,” Brown said. “And it was a challenge trying to put people where they should have been placed.

“In general,” he added, “with Ben (Simmons’) injury this year, you never felt like you jumped into a routine or a rhythm.”

•••

The only coach Joel Embiid has ever had in the NBA likely is in danger of losing his job. With Brown’s job in peril Sunday, the Sixers’ center offered some, though hardly rousing, support.

“He’s an even better person than a coach,” Embiid said. “He really cares about his players. He cares about people that work with him. No matter what decision is made, and I don’t know what is going to happen, and I trust management and all that stuff, he is going to be a great friend, no matter what.”

••• Tobias Harris crashed to the floor with 2:40 left in the third quarter Sunday, suffering a lacerated left eye. After passing a concussion test, Harris returned with 5:12 left in the game, sporting a bandage and an unwillingness to easily surrender.

“I wanted to get back with the guys,” said Harris, who scored 20 points in 35:06.

Brown, for one, was not surprised.

“It’s what we all have known him to be,” the coach said. “He has emerged to be a very consistent leader all over the place.”

•••

To Brown, Game 3 was the one in the series that got away.

“I think the defense we played was good enough,” he said. “I think the offensive shot selection was good enough. I think our defense was good enough. I think getting to the free throw line as much as we did was good enough. I think that instead of shooting 29 percent that we actually shot 32 percent, we win by eight.”

••• Among the Sixers’ prizes for a difficult season, Brown believes, is the discovery and development of Shake Milton as a starting NBA point guard.

“My projection is that it is going to be a launching pad to a very, very successful career,” Brown said. “Sometimes you can’t say it with the confidence I am saying it right now, primarily because there are character flaws, or maybe this is something you see as an outlier and it is a little big fool’s gold. But there aren’t any character flaws. His game is not fool’s gold. And he’s young.”

Milton scored 14 points Sunday.

•••

For what could have been the last game of the season, Brown chose not to stray from his starting lineup of Joel Embiid, Tobias Harris, Josh Richardson, Milton and Al Horford.

So, to the end, he would remain convinced of Horford’s value to his starting five.

“He’s been in the playoffs for 12 years,” Brown explained during the series. “He’s Al Horford. There’s a physicality that I knew he would bring to the table. And I just trusted his resume. I trusted the fact that he was going to come with an adult mind and a physical presence. It didn’t take a lot of thought, truly.”