Sixers' Brown searching for new identity for his team

MILWAUKEE - For more than a season and a half, 76ers coach Brett Brown has slowly been building an identity for his painfully young team. He talked at the beginning of last season about how his group needed to be one of the fastest in the league, and they were, leading the NBA in pace a season ago.

From the first moment of training camp this season, Brown said the focus was on defense, an area in which his club remained near the bottom in the NBA for most of last season. This year, his team has improved dramatically in that area, now ranking 12th in defensive efficiency after finishing last season at 26th.

The catalyst for much of those improvements, Brown stated repeatedly, was Michael Carter-Williams. Last Thursday, MCW was traded to Milwaukee just before the trade deadline. As he left, so did the identity that Brown and his coaching staff worked so hard to build.

The team started the season with Carter-Williams and Tony Wroten as its point guards. With them, Brown could still keep the frenzied pace that he so desired, but could also use their size (both 6-6) to smother defenders. The improvement in the defense had as much to do with the team's length - being able to get out on jump shooters after a priority of protecting the lane - as it did anything else. Now that is gone in favor of diminutive guards running the point in newcomers Tim Frazier, Isaiah Canaan and Ish Smith, all hovering around the 6-foot area.

In the three games since Carter-Williams and McDaniels were dealt, the Sixers have given up an average of 109.3 points. In the previous 12 games they gave up just 92.9 per. They've also taken on a new offensive identity. While Carter-Williams and Wroten will never scare defenses with their outside shooting, the guards that Brown has inherited are not bashful about launching from long distance. In the past two games the team has gone 26-for-65 (40 percent) from the three-point line, marking the first time in team history that it's made at least 13 three's in consecutive games.

"It changes dramatically on two fronts," said Brown. "First let's start with defense. We went from 28th, 27th, to nine, 10, 11, 12 from last year to this year. That's what we said from the start and to these guys' credit we delivered and we were seeing the effort for all that time put in and doing something very simple leading up to the All-Star break. You could feel from a coaching standpoint, we had a purpose, we had a rhythm, we had level of accountability. Now you come in with six-foot guards and not 6-6 guards, where you can switch and do some things. It puts a real premium on how do you coach pick-and-roll defense, which is really the sport in many ways. So from that perspective it changes dramatically.

"Offensively, to give somebody the ball and have them run a team that they have never been on and have a group of other people that have been with me since October and so on, that's challenging for the rest of the team and the responsibility of these new point guards. You give them the ball, they are the driver of our car. And so it's challenging all over the place. I think it's going to take five to seven games to find some level of a routine, a rhythm that we experienced pre-All-Star break."

That is probably being quite optimistic. While Brown admits that his scheming at both ends of the floor are still very vanilla, it has been obvious over the past couple of games that the defense that was on the same page pre- All-Star game is now a scrambling mess.

"That's not who we are," Brown said after the team gave up 119 points at Miami on Monday. "That's not even close to who we are. You have a luxury of shooters coming in and you've got a punishment that we have to regroup and reclaim our identity, which has to be defense. It's going to have to be or we're not going anywhere. And that's that."

The Sixers claimed forward Thomas Robinson off waivers yesterday and he will join the team as soon as possible, possibly even today in Milwaukee.

The 6-9 University of Kansas product who will turn 24 next month, was taken fifth overall in the 2012 draft by the Sacramento Kings. He played 51 games for them his rookie season before moving to Houston where he played 19 more. He's played the last 2 years in Portland. In 172 NBA games he's averaged 4.6 points and 4.4 rebounds in 13.5 minutes. In his third and final season at Kansas, Robinson averaged 17.7 points and 11.9 rebounds.