Brett Brown’s view of his Sixers is simply smashing

PHILADELPHIA >> From multiple corners of a downtown rooftop bistro Wednesday, Brett Brown could see as far as he wanted. As usual, he would look everywhere but down.

He is 58, and he has made it as close to the top as he’d ever hoped. When training camp opens next week in Camden, he will have the team he wanted, with the players he wanted, with the size and the versatility and the depth that he wanted.

It has taken a while, seven years, a virtual lifetime for a major-league head coach. But he has never forgotten the sixword statement, the one he first made to himself and then repeat to the press, back when he was 51: “I remember my first press conference and saying, ‘Imagine if we get this right.’” Imagine. Brown was enjoying his annual pre-camp lunch with basketball writers, surfacing in public for one of the few times since a Kawhi Leonard shot bounced once, twice, a third time and a fourth before dripping into the rim and jolting him into another empty offseason. Since then, because it is what the Sixers do, there has been the usual roster upheaval. But to Brown, after all those other rosters, including four since that 52-win 2017-2018 season, it finally makes sense.

“I want to get the No. 1 seed,” Brown said.

Two seasons ago, he’d set a public goal to reach the playoffs. Last fall, after making multiple roster changes, he established winning the Eastern Conference as the target. This season, Brown’s mission is to win the home-court advantage through the postseason tournament. Maybe next season, he will talk parade. Trust the process. But Brown is anything but vague about what the Sixers are, what they will be and how they should be perceived.

“You should write this with a really thick crayon,” he said. “And hear me loudly: We will end up playing smash-mouth offense and bully-ball defense. We have the team that can do that.”

Brown has been around Philadelphia long enough and around the NBA even longer to know that such declarations will wind up on t-shirts. So they were not casually tossed into the conversation, but were meant to resonate and define.

To Brown, the Sixers will be big enough in any standard defense and mobile enough when switching is necessary to make them difficult to attack and unlikely to surrender an offensive rebound. And with his projected starting lineup of 7-0 Joel Embiid, 6-10 Ben Simmons, 6-10 Al Horford, 6-9 Tobias Harris and 6-6 Josh Richardson, he is convinced that on any one possession his team will have at least one size advantage likely to result in a powerful move into scoring position.

“Are we going to be cast as a team that takes a bunch of threes?” Brown said. “That’s not our identity. But I think we’ve got the capabilities of shooting the ball.”

Two years ago, they had plenty of shooters, including JJ Redick, Robert Covington, Ersan Ilyasova and Marco Belinelli. But after winning those 52 games, they retooled. Last season, they tried to win early with a more versatile defensive team, but quickly flipped Covington and Dario Saric for Jimmy Butler. Later, they made another major personnel shift, mixing in Harris. And ever refusing to rest, Elton Brand broke it down yet again over the summer, effectively spending for Horford and not Butler, allowing Redick to leave, adding Richardson, and recommitting to Simmons at the point.

That is massive upheaval in just over a year, particularly after a sevengame series against the eventual world champions that ended in Leonard’s legendary game-winner.

“That one stings,” Brown said, “because I believed that we really could have won a championship.”

So did the owner, Josh Harris, who famously passed on a public postseason opportunity to commit to Brown for another season. Ultimately, the Sixers chose to keep their coach and to stop letting Butler try to control everything by barging into coaches meetings and telling teammates where to sit at postgame press conferences.

With that, Brown had the team he wanted, one that can bully and smash and contend for the No. 1 seed. And if not? “I’ve grown up in this environment and I understand,” Brown said. “It is going to be a low media content day when you write, ‘Brett Brown is on the hot seat.’ I am going to say, ‘Could you not find something else to write?’ Because it’s been that way every year since I’ve been here. The hot seat. But my temperature concern is my team. It’s the locker room. It’s what we are doing to help the spirit.

“I can’t look at you and say, ‘Oh, I don’t care.’ That’s not true either. But I can tell you that I feel at peace with the purpose. I feel at peace with what I need to focus on. Some of it is because I have been here for seven years. I know there is an expiration date on all of this. But I have enthusiasm and excitement and a belief that we can contest for a championship,

“We’re pretty close right now. We’re pretty close. And so, I live in that space.”

From where it started, that’s a long way up.

Contact Jack McCaffery at jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE Sixers coach Brett Brown has been excited before, as he was here during the Sixers’ NBA playoff run. But the 58-year-old excitable boy says he truly believes he has the balanced starting crew capable of earning a No. 1seed for the next playoff tour.