Sixers' Brett Brown still trying to solve 'big' problem
'I THINK IT'S been a struggle. I think it has been hard. It has improved slowly but it has been hard."
'I THINK IT'S been a struggle. I think it has been hard. It has improved slowly but it has been hard."
Those were the words of 76ers coach Brett Brown. Care to guess what the subject was? It could be a generalization of this season, of the two-plus seasons he's been here or just about anything else on the spectrum of the organization during his time at the helm.
Those words were the coach's assessment of what it has been like to try and decipher the best way to have Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel on the court together.
For the most part, Brown has been starting the two together, with Okafor at the center spot and Noel at the power-forward position. The problems that arise offensively are due to Okafor's tremendous scoring ability around the basket. That means when he is doing his thing in the paint, there isn't much, if any, room for Noel, who can't score very well outside of five feet. Defensively, Okafor simply isn't a good post defender right now and having Noel cover power forwards, many of whom are of the stretch variety, takes him away from the basket where he is a very good defender.
Over the past couple of games Brown has tried something different with Okafor when the two are sharing the court. Friday in Washington, Okafor started the game on Jared Dudley, the Wizards' power forward who is a more than capable outside shooter.
That didn't go so well. When Dudley was hanging out around the three-point line, Okafor was drawn toward the basket, like a moth to light. It is what he has done all his life - roamed the paint on defense. Problem was, he often got just a bit too far away from Dudley, who would then drain a wide-open jumper.
Saturday, in the team's 103-98 win over Brooklyn, Brown again started Okafor at the four defensively, this time assigned to former Sixer Thaddeus Young. That worked out much better as Young is more of a midrange jump-shooter, so Okafor had less of an area to cover. The result was that he and Noel both blocked four shots and the team put together a strong defensive performance overall.
It is all still such a riddle this year. Brown is starting to sort things out, and knows he will have Joel Embiid, Dario Saric and possibly more big men waiting in the wings next season.
"On offense the thing that comes up the most to me is space," said Brown. "When one is in the pick-and-roll, where is the other? When one is being posted, where is the other? It's navigating how do you create space with two bigs who really aren't known for making jump shots. That's a challenge for the team. Defensively, trying to pair them up, somebody is going to have to have somebody in trail. We all know it's become a small game in fourth periods, especially.
"The decision on how you end games is influenced for me dramatically in how do you guard when you're running back and Nerlens is always used to going to the rim and blocking shots. Now (Okafor's) got to go find guys like Dudley, who's a 45 percent three-point shooter. That's hard when you haven't done that your whole life. So it's offense and space, defense and transition and trying to grow it in that capacity.
"We're trying some things with Jahlil, seeing if he can guard perimeter, four-men type and let Nerlens block shots. It's not something that I regret. That's our job, we have to see how to pair those two up. We're trying different things."
It's not a bad idea, of course. What does Brown or the team have to lose? Eyes aren't set on what's happening on the court now so much as what will be happening in the future. And how these two are best-suited is the biggest focus of Brown's attention.
"We want to see it. We want to test things and learn things," Brown said. "I'm always grounded when I ask myself, 'If the season were to end today, what would you regret?' I always listen and remind myself that it's not ended, it's now and let's just do it. We did it and we have to try things like that and I may continue to do it from time to time. That's my job, trying to figure out how to best work the two bigs.
"It's a small-ball league sometimes as much as it is a big-ball league. I don't think there's any method to the madness. You go and play an NBA game and that's where we're at in the development of our program and you do it. When you start looking at plus-minuses of groups, you'll see that we're better off defensively when we split them up. We all know that. To start games we want to try things like that from time to time. I like Nerlens back at the rim, which kind of trumps it all and we're trying to have Jahlil learn about different things. It's just like when I talked about Nerlens at a four - figure out how far can you shift, how far can you cheat. Sometimes the shift is too far off. It's just part of where we're at. It's my job to try different things and find any way that I can to pair those two up."
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