76ers’ situation familiar, but not as dire as in past
CAMDEN, N.J. >> Nearly two years after a rare public surrender of his professional tolerance, Brett Brown is back to coaching a team with a familiar look. This time, he insists, it is different.
It was just after the 2015 season, his second with the Sixers, that he half-snarled about being made to coach D-League talent and 10-day temp employees in the best basketball league ever assembled.
So, he effectively made a demand: Don’t fill that locker room again with such basketball incompetence.
“A weak moment,” Brown recalled Wednesday, at the Sixers’ practice.
A night earlier, Brown’s 76ers had lost to the Milwaukee Bucks, 112-98, never leading, at one point behind by 27. Two nights earlier, on the same Wells Fargo Center floor, they’d fallen to Detroit by 30. So there he was, the long night over, projecting frustration. It was natural. It was time.
“When you look out on the floor and you have Sergio and Justin and Justin and Timmy Luwawu and Shawn Long,” Brown said, “that’s a different group than we have obviously been used to playing.”
He had Sergio Rodriguez, a
free agent point guard unable to shoot. He had Justin and Justin (that would be Harper and Anderson, or was it the other way around?), who’d played a combined seven games for the Sixers. He had Luwawu, a rookie, talented but raw. He had Shawn Long, who’d arrived that morning from the minors.
He had more, of course. Dario Saric, a strong Rookie of the Year candidate, was there. T.J. McConnell, the preferred point guard of the moment, was available. Nik Stauskas was hot. Gerald Henderson was back. Richaun Holmes. Robert Covington can defend. But all these years, and all that tanking, and all those lottery balls, and all those pleas for help later, Brown had what he’s always had in Philadelphia: A team that cannot win, one that fell behind by 17 at halftime, then tried to rally. “I don’t think,” Saric said, “that’s possible.”
March. It’s when the truth comes out around the NBA.
Brown used a word to describe the 2015 experience, characterizing many of his players as NBA nomads, essentially good enough for short periods, then made to move on. He wishes he hadn’t been so blunt. But he was right. And while he seemed to trend toward another such exhale the other night, he was calmer by morning.
“For me, it’s completely different now,” he said. “This is always the most challenging time for our coaching staff. The difference from that weak moment that I had a few years ago is that we now look across and see Joel Embiid. And you now look across and see Ben Simmons. And you actually see the growth of Dario and Robert Covington. You understand the abundance of cap space that we have, and a real desire to jump into the freeagent market. You understand the excitement, and we still don’t know what it equals in relation to the draft.
“So think about what I just said, relative to that weak moment I had a few years ago. And I see it differently. It doesn’t diminish that this is challenge. You could use other words. But let’s stick with that one. This is challenging.”
The decay of the Sixers’ roster is explainable. Embiid is out for a third consecutive season. Ben Simmons hasn’t played. Jahlil Okafor has a knee injury that is not healing. Nerlens Noel was traded in a salary move. All could have, all would have helped. Still, the Sixers – no matter the front-office designer – manage to swirl together a team with too many unproven, incapable, previously rejected, lowerpaid incompetents.
No, Brown did not go that far in his criticism Monday, implied or otherwise. But he did acknowledge, in another rare moment of outward exasperation, that the look of his roster had a haunting familiarity.
“How can we all not look at it and just not admit it?” he said. “Let’s just call it for what it is. My analytics people have told me I have played 64 five-man rotations since the AllStar break. That’s not 40 games. That’s six games. Think of that.
“It’s born out of injury. It’s born out of trades. That’s just the way it is. And I feel the good news is that we’ve had a lot of practice at this. And when I say ‘we’ I’m talking about me and my coaching staff. And will navigate through this. We will keep our group together. We will continue to develop.”
They’ve had three years of practice with it, and are about to begin a robust test, a four-game trip to the West beginning Thursday in Portland.
“It’s my job as a head coach to take these guys and help them get better, to keep a locker room together, to play with a style that doesn’t deviate from the way we want to grow the program,” Brown said. “So that’s my judgment of what this end-of-season path equals: Did we do that? For those reasons, it’s different than when I spoke a few years ago.”
Even if it doesn’t always look that way, it is.