Brett Brown anxious for Joel Embiid's progress

IT WAS A road trip out west in late December, just after Christmas. The Sixers had played one game in Portland and were getting set to face Utah the next night. Before that game, coach Brett Brown revealed that Joel Embiid, who had made every road trip up to that point, was sent back to Philadelphia. The coach excused it with some sort of explanation, but the reasoning was loud and clear - the team wasn't happy with his work ethic.

Yesterday, during his final meeting with the media following his second season at the helm, Brown said he understands what happened with Embiid this season and reiterated that he looks forward to coaching his twin tower combination of Embiid and Nerlens Noel.

"There were times that I wasn't happy," Brown said of Embiid's workout habits. "If you can't coach your best players - I call it buying time and dying - you have nothing. I think that my experience in my first year with Joel - and I tell my guys that they want me to coach them - you want to show up on time, you want to do the right thing, we want to act the right way.

"And like all young players, Nerlens was no different [in his first year with the team] and other young players are the same; you go through heartache and you go through things that you have to stand up and say, 'That's not part of our culture.'

"That's just normal with any young player, and Joel was a part of that. Then all of the sudden, as the season has unfolded . . . you start attaining weight goals, and interestingly, like Nerlens, it's correlated when they can play.

"Put a person in a canoe and don't give them a fishing rod and it's probably frustrating. Here we are, and [Embiid] starts going to the court and his world changes - it makes sense; he's got a spirit again and it's a little bit easier. So I don't begrudge Nerlens or Joel for any of it. They're 20-year-olds, and it's my job to coach them and build a culture. We'll be better off for it, like we saw with Nerlens, when he's a playing member of the Philadelphia 76ers."

Embiid and Noel are vastly different players. Embiid is blessed with a low-post body and game, and Noel is still finding his comfort zone. But having them on the court together consumes the coach's thoughts.

"Nerlens, when he first came out, caught me off-guard because he was way behind what I thought he was going to be - physically, mentally, skill package-wise," Brown said of the Kentucky product who missed the 2013-14 first season recovering from knee surgery suffered while in college. "It was slow, hands, the whole thing. What I misjudged is the fact when you don't play basketball for that long of a time, you feel a little bit the weight of the city and the expectation. It's a collision to speed up your head, to speed up the game in an environment that is unforgiving - the NBA. [This season], we saw him blossom. We just saw a confidence level emerge with a skill package and an athleticism in a caring player that you say is pretty impressive.

"I think, with Joel, we're going to see a similar thing. I think we can't get our expectations and hopes up early. I'm not going to. Playing those two together, there are challenges there and we're going to have to be patient again in growing those two together. I think that this experience with Joel will help him. I too have learned a lot. We have to be a little bit patient when he comes back in."

Blog: ph.ly/Sixerville