Why shouldn’t Jameer Nelson run the Sixers? Danny Brière, his mirror image, is running the Flyers nicely.
Bob Myers, who's directing the search, was under-qualified when was hired and promoted by the Golden State Warriors. That worked out OK. They won four titles.
Jameer Nelson burst out of the training room exit of the 76ers locker room at the TD Garden where the team had just won its first-round playoff series. He laid a few bro-hug handshakes on a some folks, including one of the biggest big-wigs in the Sixers’ universe.
Nelson was an assistant general manager of a team that had beaten the Celtics for their first Game 7 road win in 44 years and handed the C’s their first loss of the 33 series in which they’d led by 3-1. The mood was euphoric, and Nelson, a Chester High kid and a St. Joseph’s legend who won the Naismith Award in 2004 then, as a 6-foot tall fireplug, enjoyed an unlikely 14-year career in the NBA, was in the middle of it.
The big-wig pointed at Nelson, who was being backslapped and high-fived as he made his way along the hallway, and said, “That guy is going places.”
Who knew it might be so soon?
Nine days later, following a second-round sweep by the Knicks, Sixers president Daryl Morey was fired.
» READ MORE: Mike Sielski: Bob Myers and the Sixers’ new player-personnel chief have to … yes … change the team’s culture
Two days after that, Sixers owner Josh Harris announced that Bob Myers would oversee the pursuit of Morey’s replacement. Myers, who ran the Golden State Warriors during their heyday, has worked for Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment since January 2024 and, since October, has loosely overseen all of the teams owned by HBSE with the title of president.
Myers is expected to act as a more substantial presence for the Sixers going forward. That would be good news for Nelson if he gets the job.
And he should get the job.
Hawk never dies
Yes, Nelson is the sentimental favorite among a reported Final Four candidates, an immortal Hawk who led the college to its only Elite Eight appearance since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. Nelson is a hooper. Strike one?
The other three better match the current front-office template: Analytics-based hipsters with years of institutional ladder-climbing. Nelson, not so much: He was the assistant GM of the G-League Delaware Blue Coats from 2020 to 2025, then spent the last season with the Sixers.
But while the other candidates were deciphering proprietary algorithms and debating the merits of Value Over Replacement Players (VORP), Nelson was supplying the stats for those algorithms as one of those valued players. He was also traveling, dining, rejoicing, commiserating, fighting, and living with other valued players. He has scored 9,940 points and dealt 4,508 assists more than the other finalists combined.
» READ MORE: Sixers offseason preview: Free-agency priorities, front-office hires and the futures of Joel Embiid and Paul George
Matt Lloyd, the Timberwolves’ GM with nearly 30 seasons in scouting and player personnel, is a Northwestern University nonbasketball player who was teethed on stats in the tradition of Sam Hinkie (Stanford grad school) and Morey (Northwestern, then MIT). Lloyd was a candidate for the Bulls’ top job.
Lloyd was an assistant GM with the Magic at the end of Nelson’s career in Orlando. Coincidence?
Nick U’Ren spent 15 seasons in NBA front offices but none of them in a position that involved player evaluation, recruitment, or acquisition. A protégé of Myers with the Warriors, U’Ren has spent the last three in his native Phoenix running the Mercury of the WNBA.
Mike Gansey oversaw Cleveland’s G-League team before he got his shot as the Cavs’ GM, but his latest big move was acquiring James Harden, which probably should disqualify him immediately.
It’s not as if Nelson is massively more qualified than the suits he’s competing with (sadly, nobody actually wears suits any more, except Myers). But then, Danny Brière wasn’t massively qualified when he got the keys to the Flyers franchise.
Dan the Man
Brière technically is the general manager of the Flyers, as Elton Brand was Morey’s GM. Keith Jones is the president. Nelson is a candidate for the president’s job with the Sixers, but don’t be fooled by semantics.
Brière is always credited with the structure, planning, and execution of the Flyers’ roster construction, just like Morey was. Brand had a lesser role than Brière has.
Jones was hired from the broadcast world and is less heavy-handed than Morey was in his role as Sixers president, so even Brière’s scant experience as an executive was far better than nothing.
» READ MORE: Marcus Hayes: Daryl Morey made some poor decisions, but was he simply a victim of the Sixers’ circumstances?
Like Nelson, Brière enjoyed a long, productive playing career, 17 years all told. After a brief stint out of hockey, he spent more than four years running the Flyers’ low-level minor league team in Maine, then spent two years as a front office apprentice for the Flyers before taking over for Chuck Fletcher in March 2023. For the record, Fletcher is a Harvard grad who had climbed the ladder.
Brière served as interim GM but, after a few months, he got the job permanently. Brière has shined.
He fired disinterested coach John Tortorella before the end of the 2024-25 season and replaced him with Rick Tocchet, who has proven to be an excellent choice to complete the rebuild. He drafted Matvei Michkov, who has shown star qualities through two seasons, and Porter Martone, who has shown superstar qualities in his six weeks of NHL play. He signed Dan Vladař to replace former franchise goalie Carter Hart, whose legal troubles spirited him away from the Flyers through no fault of Brière’s.
There have been several other moves (trading for Trevor Zegras) and non-moves (not trading Rasmus Ristolainen) that helped the Flyers arrive in the playoffs at least one year early, where they won a series, which is at least two years early, beating the Penguins, which is timeless.
Most important, for the first time in years, the Flyers’ future looks bright.
Brière has shown his real genius in connecting with players when they struggle, especially the young ones.
Marcus Hayes alerts
What does this prove?
It proves that, despite a lack of experience, if you put the right guy in the right job at the right time with the right support, he can succeed.
Myers is proof of this.
Talk to me, Goose
In an NBA now filled with hypersensitive products of Gens Z and Y, communication matters.
Nelson is well-liked and respected in the current front office and, significantly, in a locker room with three max-contract players. That matters.
Everybody wants the deep-thinking analytics gurus. Well, the Sixers have had three of those: Hinkie, Bryan Colangelo, and Morey. They managed to extend the streak of avoiding the Eastern Conference finals to 25 years.
They’ve never had a person with top-level power who had any real capacity or communication with the players. Hinkie was unable to process the misbehaving young men he drafted in Nerlens Noel and Jahlil Okafor, and that cost him his job. Colangelo on social media actively sabotaged the very young men he was supposed to nurture.
Morey apparently reneged on a handshake wink-wink deal with Harden that destroyed his relationship with Harden. Then at the trade deadline in February, Morey “sold high“ on Jared McCain, a massively popular young player seemingly reduced to draft capital in Morey’s eyes.
Nelson might need help to navigate the byzantine salary cap and transaction rules of the NBA, but as a player he led teams that included Dwight Howard and Matt Barnes and were coached by Stan Van Gundy. Pretty sure he can handle Joel Embiid, who seldom plays, and Paul George, who seldom plays and gets suspended.
» READ MORE: David Murphy: Joel Embiid’s future is a secondary concern for the Sixers compared to VJ Edgecombe’s
There is an innate logic to the notion that difficult NBA players will be at least marginally more accepting of discipline and disappointment when it’s delivered by the hand of the person who has been in their shoes.
Besides, Myers will always be there to help with the big jobs.
This sort of arrangement has worked in the NBA before. A team hired a promising young man as an assistant GM with the idea he would apprentice for a few seasons. However, after just one year, that young man was promoted to GM.
As it turned out, the organization also employed an accomplished executive who was willing to spend endless hours over several years grooming the young man into a future Hall of Fame inductee.
The mentor was Jerry West.
The protégé: Bob Myers.
