Dealing with ‘noise’ part of Sixers season, even that from LeBron James’ helicopter

As Anfernee Simons was discussing the first day of training camp for the 76ers, the noise from outside the Sixers practice facility began getting louder.

The sound of a helicopter mixed in with the soft-spoken responses from Simons, and there could not have been a more obvious metaphor for what awaits the Sixers this season. The external chatter, or noise, will be loud; the Sixers have to deal with it.

The helicopter was there to whisk LeBron James away as he will split his time between Philadelphia and New York while at home this season. James himself acknowledged at media day Monday that his arrival comes with a lot of noise, noise that will be “doubled, tripled and quadrupled now that I’m here,” he said.

» READ MORE: LeBron James is here because of Tyrese Maxey. That says something about both of them.

He wasn’t talking about actual decibel levels, but that also increased in the gym Tuesday.

“Ultimate professional,” Simons said of James. “I think he’s built that for 20-plus years now. You hear the stories about him being here early, getting his work done, and saw that today. He was here already getting warmed up by the time I walked through the door. Just speaks to how he’s able to play like this for 24 years.”

The helicopter was one part of what was hardly a typical practice day for the Sixers. Dozens of media members attended Tuesday with camera operators lined up in a small hallway just outside the practice courts, waiting for the door to open so they could rush at practice’s end to get the best spot to film interviews.

But so many were present that the Sixers called an audible before coach Nick Nurse spoke post-practice and moved their media setup away from the corner of the facility to create more space for the assembled hoard to circle around Nurse.

“It’s going to be different,” Nurse said of the attention. “Just … more people, more eyes, more stories, more national TV, all that kind of stuff. I mean, it’s the same. It’s just a little more, right?”

When the team let reporters in for the last few minutes to watch players go through individual workouts, James and some of the other big names, like Joel Embiid and Jaylen Brown, had left the floor, a slight disappointment for those hoping to catch some B-roll of the stars working out.

No one is under any illusions that the Sixers will be under the media and social media microscope, the kind of pressure cooker that examines every interaction and dissects body language looking for internal points of friction.

“I’m just trying to get to the practice floor and to the game floor. If we can do those two things, all that other stuff, we just kind of handle it as smoothly as we can,” Nurse said. “We understand there’ll be some ups and downs. Let’s look out for each other. Let’s connect if there’s any bumpy stuff happening outside this wall, let’s get back in between the lines and let’s get to work.”

To Simons, blocking out the proverbial noise means not letting the outside world define what the expectations are for this team.

“Focus on our goals that we got inside this building,” Simons said. “Everybody’s gonna set outside expectations on us, but if we fulfill our own expectations that we set for ourselves, and focus on that, I think we’ll be fine.”

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As James pointed out this week, that will take “honest conversations” and “doing things that [are] uncomfortable.” He also mentioned how he spoke to Tyrese Maxey before joining the team and asked if he thought his personality would be a good fit with the franchise.

“Because I understand my personality and what comes with me,” James said. “Sometimes it can be a negative. You know, I understand some people maybe can’t handle what I may bring to the table, and I was just … asking all the questions that I could ask to him.”

As the helicopter noise faded, Simons finished his media session a few minutes later. The team took down its interview setup, and the gym was quiet. Day one of practice was in the books, a few hundred more to go.