April 17, 2015
In the short time I’ve covered the team, Brett Brown was less positive prior to Wednesday night’s season finale against the Heat than he ever has been before a game. Always upbeat, the Sixers head coach often describes how his positivity can lead to naiveté in terms of truly believing his undermanned team can steal games from one of the NBA’s elite, against all odds.
As he reflected on another season chock-full of losing basketball, Brown volunteered that he was looking forward to the final buzzer sounding,. The coach surprisingly sounded like someone who was tired of coaching an 18-64 team, which isn’t surprising at all if this wasn’t Brett Brown that we’re talking about. If positivity were a superpower, he would be one of the Avengers.
“For me, this was a hard year,” Brown said. “To lose two years in a row like we did, I would be not telling the truth if that wasn’t hard… I try to remind myself all the time, ‘Don’t get tricked.’ Really, the win-loss record is probably, in a list of what’s most important, not in the top ten if we’re really trying to build a program.”
“At the end of the day, to coach gypsies, to be able to coach a revolving door, that’s not what I’m looking for,” Brown said. “I think that Sam and Josh understand that we need a level of consistency to move [the program] forward."
When Brown says things along those lines, I think back to when the Sixers formally introduced him in a press conference in August 2013. Believe it or not, he spelled out exactly what was to come! Here’s a quote courtesy of Sporting News’ Sean Deveney from that day:
“We all know the pain of rebuilding is real,” Brown said. “We all will experience it. It isn’t something that happens quickly. As logical as it is to say that, it is a fact, that is the truth. There needs to be a tolerance, there needs to be a patience.”
Even though Dalton famously decreed that “Pain don’t hurt” in the American cinematic classic “Road House,” losing 60-plus games for two consecutive years can be a lot for even the optimist’s optimist. Brown predicted that he was in store for a trying couple of years, and that’s exactly what he got. Maybe out of frustration or maybe out of fatigue, Brown made it clear that wins and losses will take on a greater importance next season. That is, until he didn’t.
“When I give you that answer, nobody here can misinterpret what I’m saying,” Brown said. “We need to see that we’re moving forward. Now how do you quantify that with a number of wins? I’m not prepared to give that answer…”
So he gave the answer, but also didn’t give the answer. The idea of moving forward interests me, because from a sheer win-loss perspective, it’s hard to move further backward than where the Sixers currently sit on the NBA totem pole. It has become one of Brown’s default answers (along with sports science, health, nutrition, and all of that good stuff which is ultimately secondary) when asked for a specific contention timeline, but it could mean a whole host of things.
While we’re here, I’ll spell it out in more concrete terms: For next season to be considered a success as far as what is important long-term, Joel Embiid has to remain healthy and at least show flashes of being a Top-20 player a little bit down the road. If the year doesn’t unfold that way, Nerlens Noel or the team’s top pick from this year’s draft needs to pick up the slack.
It mostly seems like Brown wants a little more stability with the roster next season, a steady stable of players that could help the Sixers operate more like a regular NBA team. A Larry Drew or Tim Frazier once in a while would be fine, but Brown wants the days of the 31-player Sporcle quizzes with more difficult names to remember than your average “Game of Thrones” episode to be a thing of the past.
“At the end of the day, to coach gypsies, to be able to coach a revolving door, that’s not what I’m looking for,” Brown said. “I think that Sam and Josh understand that we need a level of consistency to move [the program] forward. That doesn’t mean we have to be pregnant with average players.”
(To continue with that analogy, the 2008-12 teams did a lot shopping in the maternity section at Nordstrom’s.)
Generally though, Brown’s remarks sound like a pretty good place to start for 2015-16. Even if the team’s record doesn’t rise dramatically — I’ll give an early guestimate and say 28 wins without having any clue what the roster will look like (so, an altogether pointless exercise) — the Sixers should at least inch toward operating like a normal NBA team when it comes to the issue of roster stability.
“I hope that if we can have something that’s stable and consistent, we’re going to be able to talk a little bit easier at this time next year,” Brown told reporters at PCOM yesterday. “There will be volatility, there has to be. We’re not going to find 15 guys that are ours forever. And so, you just hope that number shrinks.”
Brown isn’t asking for much. I think his request is a fairly reasonable next step.
