Keeping the Negadelphia tradition alive a few days ago, I focused on the one subject Brett Brown *doesn’t* want to talk about. The story was newsworthy, but it’s also a tad unfair to focus on the outlier. This is a genial and loquacious man that we’re talking about, people!
Let’s try to balance our coverage from Wednesday’s chat with Brown in the Navy Yard. Both the head coach and Sixers organization as a whole are finishing up a long offseason, and Brown was ready, willing, and able to talk about it. Here are some of the highlights:
Brown wanted his assistants to take better jobs, and he’s not replacing them with traditional hires: With assistant coaches getting promotions and out-of-the-box sports science positions, the Sixers are operating an awful lot like the football team that plays across the street. They’re winning about as much, too. Chad Iske, who received a promotion to associate head coach, and Vance Walberg, who hails from Northern California, left for George Karl’s staff in Sacramento. Both had previously coached under Karl in Denver.
“When you look at the qualities of successful teams and especially successful offensive teams, the pass is everything,” Brown said.
“It’s a situation where we encouraged it,” Brown said. “And for any of our coaches to have an opportunity to earn a higher income or to receive a better title, I feel like it’s part of my responsibility to grow coaches or provide opportunities like Vance going home.”
Brown likes the young coaches on his staff, which is why the Sixers spent a lot of time recruiting Dr. David Martin (sports science) and Todd Wright (strength and conditioning). What those moves mean for who exactly ends up on the bench besides Lloyd Pierce and Billy Lange, I am not particularly sure.
In the case of Wright, Brown believes strength and conditioning is an area the Sixers and NBA as a league can generally improve upon. For example, he believes there is more to Kevin Durant’s (who Wright coached at Texas) “rip through” move than technique.
“Almost all facets of the game nowadays, I see as a breakdown or strength and condition drill apart from the holistic lens that most coaches look at it,” Brown said. “I see it like that, so we went overboard.”
Brown hung out with Jay Wright in Israel: Brown logged quite a few frequent flyer miles this summer. He of course traveled to Utah and Las Vegas for summer league. He visited Australia to see the Boomers, the national team he used to coach, qualify for the Olympics in Rio next year. He went up to Springfield, Massachusetts to watch Lindsay Gaze, one of his earliest coaching mentors, get inducted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
But what I found most interesting, and maybe it’s at least partially because I also follow Villanova, was Brown’s trip to the Middle East with Jay Wright. The two coaches traveled to both Israel and Palestine and ran basketball clinics for young players in areas of conflict like the West Bank. According to Brown, he was able to see some eye-opening things.
They did also find some time to talk hoops, like about the need to at least pay attention to trends in analytics. Another topic that interested Brown was how tilted the college out of bounds rules are toward inbounding the ball from underneath the basket.
“I think college coaches are better than NBA coaches when it comes to executing underneath out of bounds [plays] because of the rules,” Brown said. “They’re down there almost to a 3-to-1 ratio more.”
If Brown was looking for tips, Wright knows a thing or two about baseline out of bounds plays.
Brown, like everyone else, doesn’t know who will play point guard: It’s not an embellishment to say the Sixers’ guards are the weakest position group in the entire league. Tony Wroten and Kendall Marshall, the team’s most proven lead guards (which is to say, not very proven at all), both won’t play at training camp due to the recovery from injuries suffered last season.
Summer signings like Pierre Jackson, Scottie Wilbekin, and T.J. McConnell (who I’m not sure has officially signed yet) will battle for actual NBA minutes. Isaiah Canaan is probably the favorite to start by default. Brown anticipates that the Sixers will only keep three point guards, but those spots are wide open.
“We’re going to have a fist fight in Stockton,” Brown said.
One of Brown’s pet phrases is, “The pass is king.” That is the type of culture he was part of in San Antonio for a decade, and he believes instilling that mentality starts with the point guard. According to Brown, the Sixers need to find a guard who can primarily get Jahlil Okafor the ball on the block, work a pick-and-roll with Nerlens Noel, and kick out to shooters like Robert Covington and Nik Stauskas.
“When you look at the qualities of successful teams and especially successful offensive teams, the pass is everything,” Brown said.
Early prediction: If he can come back close to 100 percent from the torn ACL suffered last January, Marshall will be the point guard that Brown settles on. Yesterday, the head coach said that Marshall “can pass the hell out of it.”
Brown thinks Joel Embiid’s recovery is going better than last year’s: Martin was hired to lead Embiid’s recovery, and Brown has a lot of faith in the man that the Sixers hired away from the Australian Institute of Sport.
In addition to a fresh medical perspective, the Sixers arranged for Embiid to meet Zydrunas Ilgauskas in New York a few weeks ago. A motivation tool, perhaps. The former Cavs center is a success story when it comes to overcoming navicular bone injuries. Actually, he might be the success story. In Big Z’s first five NBA seasons, he played a total of 115 games. Over the next ten years, the 7-foot-3 Lithuanian appeared in 808.
“I think some of the things that we all needed to do better at, whether it was Joel, or the Philadelphia 76ers, or me in regards to helping him understand the professionalism required and things that he has to do in order to give himself the best chance to come back, we’re so much better off,” Brown said.
Brown thinks Nik Stauskas was in a tough spot last year: In order to do a little homework on Stauskas, Brown has been in contact with John Beilein and Steve Nash. Beilein, who will visit the Sixers at Stockton, was Stauskas’ college coach at Michigan. Nash works with Stauskas and the Canadian national team.
Point blank, Brown was asked what he made of Stauskas’ forgettable rookie season.
“Sacramento had some issues, not a very stable environment,” Brown said. “Like most rookies, he was trying to find his feet in an unstable environment, probably not as good of an environment you would want to start your NBA career in.”
“After they released their coach, made some trades, and you started looking at what he did after that when actually started playing, you saw signs of what he did in college.”
Brown made it clear that he thinks Stauskas has a long way to go. He’s hoping Philly is the environment where he can start moving in the right direction.
Follow Rich on Twitter: @rich_hofmann