Brett Brown, walking by himself in the Maine woods when he was reached by phone last Friday afternoon, pronounced himself “slightly beneath outstanding.”

“Just a little bit,” the 76ers’ former coach said. “Just a sliver.”

A slivah, in Brown’s distinctive New England/Australian accent.

He has scarcely been heard from since the Sixers fired him in August 2020, after seven years on the job. But when I called to discuss the retirement last week of JJ Redick, Brown was only too happy to oblige. He said Redick, who enjoyed the two biggest scoring seasons of his 15-year career playing for him, was “amongst a handful of my favorites” and added that “his days with me, selfishly, were personally my most memorable, my most fond days in Philadelphia.”

Our 20-minute conversation meandered to other topics as well. While he politely declined to discuss the ongoing Ben Simmons fiasco — a stance he has taken as a matter of course with all reporters who reach out to him — he expressed wonder at the randomness of coaching (if not life), satisfaction at where things stand with him, family-wise, and determination to return to the NBA at some point.

As he put it, he keeps in touch with his “two decades worth of coaching friends” and holds out “hope to be a head coach again one day.” In other words there’s a yearning to return to the maelstrom in which he was only recently immersed (and in which Doc Rivers finds himself now, with training camp opening this week).

There’s no rush; Brown’s contract with the Sixers runs through the end of the ‘21-22 season. He is free to do what he wants for the time being, which since his dismissal has included frequent trips from his suburban Philadelphia home to his hometown of Portland, Maine, where he looks in on his 80-something parents; he has also taken time to remodel a downtown loft there.

In the meantime the three children he has with his wife Anna have reached interesting junctures in their lives. The oldest, Julia, who has special needs and was profiled in October 2020 by the Main Line Times, is getting a place of her own. The middle child, Laura, is in Temple Dental School, and the youngest, Sam, is beginning his junior year at Lower Merion, where his basketball career is gaining momentum.

According to the elder Brown, Sam, a “wannabe hooper” (Brett’s words) and good student, has received recruiting interest, and to that end has visited Harvard and Penn, and plans to visit Richmond as well. 

“And,” Brett said, “that’s all been just a real lot of fun for me.”

He was no less gratified by the fact that Mike Budenholzer, his friend and former colleague on the San Antonio staff, won a championship as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks over the summer.

“Maybe he’s a Kyrie Irving sprained ankle away from being fired,” Brown said, referring to an injury suffered by the Brooklyn Nets star against the Bucks in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Brooklyn’s James Harden was also limited by a hamstring pull, but the Nets might have won the series anyway, if Kevin Durant’s toe hadn’t been on the line when he appeared to bury a decisive 3-pointer in the closing seconds of Game Seven. As it was, the Bucks won in overtime, then beat Phoenix in the Finals.

“Maybe, maybe, maybe — we’ve all got those stories,” Brown said. “That’s the fragility of our world.”

Then he reflected back on the improbable four-bounce corner jumper Toronto’s Kawhi Leonard coaxed in to beat the Sixers at the buzzer, in Game Seven of the 2019 Eastern semis.

“Kawhi’s shot doesn’t go in, maybe we’re going to win a championship,” Brown said. “Forget sport — it’s the way life works.”

That ‘18-19 team was undoubtedly the best Brown coached in his time with the Sixers, as it featured not only Redick and Simmons but Joel Embiid, Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris. Butler left after that season, as did Redick, for New Orleans. He spent a season and a half there, then bowed out at age 37, after 13 injury-marred games with Dallas last season.

Brown revered Redick not only for his sublime shooting — his 41.5 percent marksmanship from the arc is third-best among those attempting at least 4,500 career 3s, according to Statmuse.com — but also his leadership, sense of humor and smarts. That was evident from the moment the Sixers signed him, shortly after midnight on July 1, 2017.

“We’re probably in an office for 10 minutes, and we were on a court (in the team’s practice facility) for probably two hours,” Brown said.

Embiid happened to be there, and the three of them began reviewing the ways in which Redick might be used in concert with the team’s centerpiece. And never mind that Redick was in street clothes; they walked through things again and again, Redick’s basketball IQ immediately apparent.

“For players and coaches for sure, life makes a hell of a lot more sense when you can get on a court, and just talk about the things that we spoke of,” Brown said.

Brown has a saying: “The gym will speak,” meaning that everything about a team can be determined on the practice court. That turned out to be true for Redick, who averaged 17.1 and 18.1 points a night in his two seasons with the Sixers, as well as Embiid, who continued his climb into the stratosphere.

“And the engagement that Joel and JJ had, it was clear,” Brown said. “And when you fast-forward to the years that I coached him, when it’s 92-92 with three minutes left, those two were in an action. And funny enough, when you rewind it, lots of those things that we spoke about were talked about the night that he signed.”

Much has changed since. So many key pieces gone, and Simmons apparently about to go. But Brown, at least, is “slightly beneath outstanding,” and the gym continues to speak to him, continues to beckon.