Brown pleased with young Sixers' resilience

BRETT BROWN'S young 76ers team just doesn't get it. His active roster, with seven players playing their first season and two more playing their second, don't seem to understand the rigors of the NBA.

And the coach wouldn't have it any other way.

Tuesday's game against the Denver Nuggets was the team's fourth in five nights and finished a grueling stretch of 20 games in 33 days. The point guard was battling a lower leg injury over the weekend, and two of the Sixers' previous three games came against teams in the midst of double-digit win streaks.

So naturally, in consecutive games, the Sixers fell behind the Atlanta Hawks and Cleveland Cavaliers by huge margins, only to close in on the two powerhouses in the final quarter of the game before succumbing to superior talent.

Against Denver on Tuesday, with Michael Carter-Williams laboring with a shin injury and legs undoubtedly feeling more like wet noodles than springs, the team came out storming in the first quarter, scoring 34 points on 13-for-19 shooting and dishing 11 assists on 13 field goals. If tired bodies and/or minds took the court for Brown, they did a heck of a job of masking it for 48 minutes in securing a 105-98 win. It was the most points they'd scored since Dec. 13.

It is a group with boundless energy and seemingly short memories. While Tuesday's win improved the team to only 11-39, the players' sunny disposition hasn't wavered during any of the long losing stretches.

"I hope it's a product of the fantastic effort and attention that we give them with sports science," Brown said of his team's physical resilience. "I think that the people around me do a great job. I think that the staff around me does a great job.

"The day-to-day effort that we put in as a staff and that I make sure that we put in on educating our guys on hydration and massages and health and sleep. We talk about it every single day. I hope that has something to do with it. I think that youth has something to do with it, and I think that telling them that life in the NBA isn't for everybody.

"To play this volume of minutes, to be a starter, to have the expectations that we do on them for 82 games - it's not for everybody. But this is the environment that they are in, so our young guys have to say that this is the way that this league operates, and it's challenging for them. It's caught all of them off guard - the frequency, the physicality, the demand - that we place on them. We're still standing. We still come out fighting and, to date, I haven't seen a spirit or physical letdown."

While the All-Star break looms, it is probably still daunting to players such as Nerlens Noel, K.J. McDaniels, JaKarr Sampson and Jerami Grant that 32 more games remain. Consider that during their last year of playing college ball, Noel played 24 games (before getting injured), McDaniels played 36, Sampson 33 and Grant 32. That means that they all basically have a full college season's worth of games to go. Still, the grind hasn't seemed to have gotten to them, yet.

"To just be there throughout an entire game with Atlanta and Cleveland, you are quite proud of yourself, like you're among the elite if you're just steadily playing with that level of good teams," Brown said.

"We just have so many peaks and valleys that we put ourselves in those holes. There are two things that stand out most to me now. [Tuesday was] our 50th game, and we're about to finish the middle third of the year and revisit what are our plans are for the final third and going into the summer.

"We have a problem with turnovers and we have a problem with defensive rebounding. We need to zoom in and fix those things to not experience the canyons of when we get down 20. A lot of times, you are going to look back at those two areas."

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