Brown is seeking to break down wall around Simmons’ confidence
CAMDEN, N.J. » This isn’t a fun time to be Brett Brown, who most recently watched a spectacular Sixers start morph into another disappointing loss to the Boston Celtics.
Brown was accused of blowing a 22-point lead by failing to take a timeout or two in the second quarter of the 108-103 defeat Thursday. The Celtics were on a 20-5 run that obviously pumped the crowd at TD Garden.
After saying he’d do the same thing the next time, Brown conceded that calling time was at least a talking point. Later it was a little bit of maybe he should of done that after all.
That wasn’t nearly as damaging as the decision to take veteran point guard T.J. McConnell out after he helped rally the Sixers to a lead in the fourth quarter. At that point, no scoring pun intended, rookie point guard Ben Simmons was overwhelmed and ineffective. Bad turned into the worst, and Simmons criticized himself for thinking too much about every little thing.
After that game and again on Friday, Brown said Simmons is his guy, and he’d do the same thing again. And that’s the issue.
Brown’s attempts to show confidence in Simmons conflicts with the philosophy of coaching to win the playoff series.
Simmons isn’t a complainer, at least publicly. Does Brown really think his guy would gripe about someone else getting the job done if the Sixers won the game and evened the series?
You can’t un-ring that bell and the message it sent.
Simmons conceded his second game with the Celtics was the low-point of his career with the Sixers. He scored one point in 31 minutes.
Plus-minus figures rarely do absolute justice to performance evaluations. But in the case of Simmons, it wasn’t just one bad game, but back-toback stinkers against the Celtics.
Simmons was minus-23 against the Celtics Thursday. He was minus-16 in the first game. For the sake of comparison, Sixers center Joel Embiid was minus-6 in the series opener and minus-8 in the second game. Robert Covington was plus-4 in Game 2, McConnell plus-16 in 17 minutes.
“T.J. played well last night,” Brown said. “He changed the game and set the table, really, for what we thought was going to be a win. But that decision about minutes and who is it, and how many, it’s always fluid but it’s behind Ben. We’re growing Ben Simmons. We’re here to win games, obviously. But somewhere in the middle of all those comments, I make a decision.”
We’re not comparing McConnell to Simmons, who averaged close to a triple-double during the season. It’s just that this series with the Celtics is a matchup nightmare for Big Ben. The Celtics have put a defensive shell around him that takes away the passing and open court skills which are his biggest strengths. Some batters struggle against certain pitchers, and vice versa.
“I think they’re just trying to build a wall around him,” McConnell said. “He’s one of the most gifted athletes in our league getting to the rim and the open floor. They’ve done a good job of kind of building a wall around him. Ben’s going to adjust. He always has, and I’m looking forward to seeing him play well.”
It’s entirely possible Simmons does a 180 and the Sixers beat the Celtics Saturday for their first victory in the series. Maybe he did have what Brown described as “an outlier.” (Make that back-to-back outliers.)
It’s also reasonable to assume that Brown, deep down inside, realizes Simmons is stuck, that perhaps he hit the rookie wall.
After all, it was Brown who said he was “really curious” about how Simmons would react to that horrible game.
“I was curious because it was his poorest game of his NBA career,” Brown said. “It’s on a pretty big stage. And people, and certainly young people, can either make excuses or own it, and he owned it. And life moves on. And I, too, share in the responsibility to help him do well. How can I help? That’s the first sort of thing that comes to my mind is how do I help put him in a place that he can do well, that he can succeed?
“The overall sort of notion that he’s shaken, it’s not even close.”
Losing the first two games of a playoff series with the Celtics is fatal. Historically the Celtics are 36-0 when ahead, 2-0, in a best-of-seven series.
For Brown, who makes the tough decisions, that wouldn’t be nearly as damaging as losing faith in a building block like Simmons.