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Sielski: Some stability for Sixers, and maybe for their coach

A coach wants to coach, which means Thursday was always going to be a happy night for Brett Brown. The NBA draft, he said, is always one of his favorite nights of the year. Thursday's was his 16th, and it was special.

A coach wants to coach, which means Thursday was always going to be a happy night for Brett Brown. The NBA draft, he said, is always one of his favorite nights of the year. Thursday's was his 16th, and it was special.

The 76ers had the No. 1 pick, and as everyone expected, they selected Ben Simmons. And minutes later there was Brown descending from the Sixers' war room at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine to the student-center gymnasium, unafraid to wield names such as LeBron and Magic when speaking about the player Simmons might yet become and the manner in which the Sixers will use him.

"Call it a point-four," Brown said, a melding of a point guard and power forward, and Brown let the slightest of grins creep over his face as he contemplated the possibilities open to him now. It's not just that Simmons is 6-foot-10 and 240 pounds and versatile and strong and just 19. It's that, barring some stunning and crushing injury, he will play right away. No broken navicular bone like Joel Embiid. No contract keeping him in Turkey like Dario Saric. No marginal or anonymous NBA players passing through town on 10-day contracts like so many Sam Hinkie experiments over the previous three seasons.

"We've now drafted something very, very special in Ben Simmons," Brown said while it was still early in the draft's first round. "And so when you start adding that into the mix of what we have and add that future with other draft picks, and we've still got more work to do before this night's over, you can actually touch people and see a team that's taking shape."

So now Brown gets a modicum of stability. He gets a team that, day to day, won't feel so much like a just-shuffled deck of cards. And he gets a measure of pressure that, truth be told, he never had to bear while Hinkie was around. The Sixers will have Simmons. They will have, they hope, Embiid and Saric. And they will have whatever players arrive and/or are left standing in the settled dust of the trade or trades that new GM Bryan Colangelo tried so desperately to make Thursday night: Nerlens Noel, Jahlil Okafor, a point guard, whoever.

Those trades didn't happen Thursday night. They didn't necessarily have to. But they will, and when they do, Brown has to show that he was worth the wait, too. He's been the public face of the franchise during these difficult years, and by talking to the media and taking the bullets and emoting after every loss, he earned himself goodwill and empathy. But he still has to show that he can move the Sixers forward in this next stage of their rebuilding, because it's beginning now, and that contract extension he signed in December is just two years. That's not forever. That's not close. Brown knows it, and that's why he was so optimistic and eager about Simmons' arrival.

If anyone had any lingering doubts about the Sixers' desire to start fresh after Hinkie's tenure as GM and president, to use the assets he left them to spring themselves in a new direction, Brown's willingness to share his tentative plans about Simmons buried those doubts.

Brown based his conclusion that Simmons would play power forward on the answers to two questions: Whom will Simmons guard, and how would he handle playing point guard full-time as a rookie? Simmons' size made the first answer relatively easy, and because Brown considers point guard to be the most challenging position to play in the NBA, "to just give [Simmons] the ball in that capacity is borderline cruel."

OK, but if Simmons starts at power forward, and if Embiid starts at center - even for limited minutes - where will Noel and Okafor play? One of them has to go, and in a perfect world, Okafor would be the one who does. Noel is too valuable as a defensive player - both at the rim and, with his speed, on the perimeter - and too fine a fit for the modern NBA to lose. And there are so many questions about Okafor's defense, maturity, and work ethic that the primary holdup to trading him might be that he needs to play a bit this season to replenish some of his perceived value.

Yes, one of them has to go to help reestablish what Brown kept calling "positional balance" Thursday, to shift some emphasis toward guards and wing players. They did a little of that shifting when they selected 6-7 swingman Timothe Luwawu, from France, with the No. 24 pick.

"Philosophically, I would have been amazed, if we thought a five-man was the best player in this year's draft, that we would have taken him," Brown said. "I don't believe that would have happened."

As it turned out, the Sixers and their coach didn't have to confront that conundrum. They took Ben Simmons, and once the dust settles, Brett Brown will have the chance to do what he always wanted to do. He will coach some players who will stay here a while, and maybe he'll earn the right to stay a while, too.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski