The latest indication of the buzz surrounding the 76ers came earlier this week, when Brett Brown held a coaches clinic in the team’s year-old practice facility in Camden, N.J.
This was a Tuesday night in September, remember, about five weeks before Brown’s team would begin its season. Also with plenty of other things going on. The Eagles are 1-0. Rhys Hoskins homers pretty much daily. (He would hit two on this night, in a 15-inning victory over the Marlins.)
Some 1,000 coaches from all levels nonetheless jammed into the place. That’s about twice as many as last year, four times as many as the year before. And the first year they held it? There were maybe 60 coaches on hand, Brown said.
Six of his players were also there to run drills for the assembled multitudes. Jahlil Okafor, looking very fit (see photo below). T.J. McConnell, recently married. Robert Covington and Richaun Holmes and a hopeful named James Blackmon Jr. Also Justin Anderson, though Brown introduced him as “James,” to Anderson’s wide-eyed dismay.
Brown can, perhaps, be excused for his gaffe. He did in fact coach James Anderson in 2013-14, his first year with the Sixers. That Anderson is now out of the league, as are so many of the players who passed through town while the team was going 75-253 in Brown’s first four years on the job.
He has called those guys “basketball gypsies,” and they have now given way to the fruits of the tank-a-thon – to potential stars like Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz. To Dario Saric, who can be a poor man’s Larry Bird if he ever develops a reliable 3-point shot. To a solid vet like J.J. Redick, over from the Clippers as a free agent. And to a self-made starter like Covington, acquired from Houston for a song a few years back.
Everybody’s talking playoffs. Las Vegas established the Sixers’ over-under for victories this season at 42.5 (since bet down to 40.5), which seems very lofty indeed for a team that went 10-72 just two seasons ago.
Does it follow, then, that the head coach is under a microscope? That now that he finally has real players to direct, he faces that much more pressure?
“I get asked that q
uestion about every other day,” Brown said. “I don’t feel it. … I’m more concerned about the homework than the exam. I want to knock out good days. I want to handle things with playoff mentality and playoff professionalism.”
He knows whereof he speaks, having been a long-time member of the Spurs’ staff, and part of the first four of their five championship teams. He often refers to those days as his “Spurs life.” Even during the clinic, as he paced the court and made a point about offensive spacing, he said, “We swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2007 (in the Finals). We didn’t care about anybody on the floor, other than LeBron James.”
We?
Not anymore. Not for a while now, in point of fact.
Brown, gray (and for the time being, bearded) at age 56, joked as he addressed the coaches about having different-colored hair when he started this job. But even when things were darkest these last four years, he remained outwardly sunny. Even as his team lost (and lost, and lost), his players were well-organized and played hard; that would seem to reflect well on him and his staff, too.
“It’s not a mystery to me,” he said. “I’ve seen high-level basketball for a long time and seen June five times, and all the things that equal how do we get where we want to go? I had the privilege of living it, so I feel like I can share it and do it. I’m always mindful our guys are ridiculously young and haven’t played with each other, but that’s said with a tremendous amount of excitement, and shouldn’t be heard any other way.”
Yes, they are young. Fultz, the No. 1 pick in the most recent draft, is 19. Simmons, No. 1 the year before, is 21. Embiid and Saric are 23. Such youth and inexperience (Fultz, Simmons and Embiid have a combined 31 NBA games under their belts, all by Embiid) figure to lead to dizzying highs and frustrating lows – to unlikely victories, and just-as-unlikely losses.
Not to be forgotten, either, is the fact that Embiid hasn’t yet been cleared to play five-on-five, some eight months after tearing the meniscus in his left knee. And the early schedule is brutal, with 16 of the first 21 games against teams that made the playoffs last year.
But the foundation has been poured. Brown talked about looking out from his courtside office – “beach-front property,” he calls it – and seeing guys working out all the time during the offseason.
“It’s just a really high-energy building,” he said. “It should be.”
It is, he added, “way different than how it was in 2013” and indicative of the fact that the players are as amped up about the team’s prospects as the fans.
More homework awaits, but the exams are coming fast.
And Philly fans don’t tend to grade on a curve.