Sixers coach Brett Brown has three months to save his job. This wasn’t a good start | David Murphy
The Sixers were on the wrong side of one of the worst runs you will see in a basketball game. Ultimately, that falls on the coach.
Stretches like these, you wonder what they think. Josh Harris. Elton Brand. The voices that matter. Did they see it the way the head coach saw it? That it wasn’t an X’s and O’s thing? That it was a matter of turnovers, of spirit, of having an All-Star point guard dressed in jeans and a blazer at the end of the bench?
If it is true that all is well that ends well, then all is well in Brett Brown’s realm. The Sixers are 35-21 and within striking distance of one of the top four seeds in the Eastern Conference. The home crowd is happy, a 112-104 overtime victory against the Nets having injected the Wells Fargo Center with an energy that makes you wish you could fast forward to April. The mercurial big man is coming off one of the most dominant performances of his career, the sort of outing that makes you scoff at anybody who has written him off as having already reached his ceiling.
Yet even after the adrenaline had settled and the seating bowl had drained, it was impossible to forget the way the night had started. For nearly a quarter-and-a-half of the first game after the All-Star break, the Sixers looked like a team that was still trying to figure out how exactly to play their game. After racing out to a 22-6 lead and watching Joel Embiid do whatever he wanted, the Sixers suddenly seemed like a train derailed after one simple Nets substitution.
44-8. That was the run that the Nets went on from the middle of the first quarter through the majority of the second. By the end of the first half, that 22-6 lead had turned into a 42-32 deficit, and the crowd reacted as you expected it would. Sometimes in this town, the jeers can feel unwarranted. In this case, if you weren’t booing, it was only because you were worried about what else would come from your mouth.
“I thought we did a good job in the second half of not turning the ball over,” Brown said. “I thought we played with a greater pace. We didn’t shoot threes, not the quantity or the percentage that we need to. I think you can point at Ben Simmons’ absence as a big reason for that. He really does a good job of quarterbacking the gym, collapsing the defense … But we clawed back and I thought the last few minutes of the second period gave us a little bit of life. And as I mentioned to the group, it wasn’t really an X-and-O thing, to me, it was, let’s rekindle our spirit. Let’s get that going first. And I feel like the turnovers and our spirit, just playing with that type of intensity changed the game."
Is that how the bosses saw it? Because what we saw in the first half was the sort of performance that can stick in one’s memory, one of the worst exhibitions of basketball since the hoops were made out of actual baskets.
This wasn’t just a team playing without its All-Star point guard. It was a team playing without a plan. At least, that’s how it looked to the 20,000 or so folks in the stands. By the closing minutes of the second quarter, the boos were so loud that you could have Shazaamed them, a one-note serenade that spoke straight from the heart.
If it wasn’t for Embiid, the Sixers would be one loss closer to opening up the postseason on the road. For 41 minutes, he was a game-changer in every sense of the word: 39 points, 16 rebounds, 18-of-19 from the foul line, all of it overshadowed by his performance on the defensive end of the court. There were times when it was borderline comical to watch Spencer Dinwiddie and Caris LeVert penetrate the paint and then dribble in circles while attempting to figure out how to navigate the final few feet to the rim. After blowing up the Nets’ final possession of regulation, Embiid pounded his chest and waved his arms to the crowd and infused the court with the sort of energy that suggested the home team was not going to find a way to lose.
“He was dominant,” Brown said.
Yet should it really have come down to that? Was this really the sort of game where the Sixers should have needed 41 minutes of MVP-caliber ball from their big man? Was this the kind of energy-sapping win that will carry over into the next however many contests?
Brown can talk about spirit and turnovers until he is even redder in the face than he was on the bench during that second-quarter disaster. In the end, he is the one responsible for putting this collection of alleged All-Star talent into positions where it can best express itself. That did not happen nearly soon enough on Thursday night.