Sielski: Not crazy to suggest that 76ers should be innovative this season
So I was talking with 76ers head coach Brett Brown at Eagles practice the other day, and he got me thinking about bat poop. Trust me. There's a connection. Just hang tight.
So I was talking with 76ers head coach Brett Brown at Eagles practice the other day, and he got me thinking about bat poop. Trust me. There's a connection. Just hang tight.
Brown and Sixers general manager Bryan Colangelo visited the NovaCare Complex on Monday, and during a brief interview near the practice fields, Brown mentioned how much he was enjoying watching Dario Saric and Sergio Rodriguez - two Sixers players he hasn't had the chance to coach yet - in the Rio Olympics. Both of them, he said, "thought the game" very well. They anticipated plays. They were unselfish. They reminded him of players he had coached on some great San Antonio Spurs teams. And they weren't the only Sixers who played this way.
"This is where this thing spins off," Brown said. "This was my Spurs world. If you take Ben Simmons and you take Dario and you take Joel Embiid and you take Sergio, those are world-class elite passers. The pass is king. That's what makes the world go round when you talk about offense: Do you share? Those four we have, they pass."
Put aside Brown's implication that Embiid will remain healthy enough to be in the Sixers' regular rotation all season, and let's deal with his words from a macro perspective. The great concern about the Sixers' roster, at least as it's now constructed, is that it lacks balance: too many big guys in Embiid, Saric, Jahlil Okafor, and Nerlens Noel; not enough above-average outside shooters to space the floor and keep defenses honest.
It is a completely legitimate concern, in large part because neither Embiid nor Saric has any NBA experience, and no one has much of an idea of what this iteration of the Sixers will look like. Based on the evidence available to everyone at the moment, this is a roster that needs to be reshaped, and Colangelo has said as much publicly.
That brings us to the bat poop - and seabird poop, all of which is commonly known as guano - and a fellow named Alexander von Humboldt. No, von Humboldt was not a Sixers second-round pick whom Sam Hinkie stashed away in a professional league in the Netherlands. He was a Prussian explorer and intellectual who made a series of trips to Latin America in the early 19th century to study the region. Guano was in abundance on islands there, and it was rich in several nutrients, particularly nitrogen, that cause plants and crops to grow. On one of his trips, to Peru in 1802, von Humboldt began testing guano as a fertilizer.
Just four years before von Humboldt's fateful expedition, the British scholar Thomas Robert Malthus had published a famous essay arguing, essentially, that mankind was doomed to starve to death, that there wasn't enough food on the planet to keep up with the rate at which the population was increasing. Based on the evidence available to Malthus at the time, it was a reasonable postulate. But what Malthus didn't and really couldn't anticipate was that flying-mammal excrement would help to feed and, in turn, save the world. Because guano was such an effective fertilizer, its value and the market for it skyrocketed over the subsequent 75 years. In 1800, according to census records, the world's population was roughly 1 billion people. Today, it is nearly 7.4 billion. So much for Malthus's projections.
The point of that historical anecdote (and a hat tip to ESPN's Will Cain for the inspiration) is this: In projecting the future, it's always difficult and often impossible to account for human beings' capacity for innovation. All we can do is try to make good decisions with the information at hand. Sometimes we'll make unsound decisions, and they'll turn out wonderfully. The Eagles, for example, gave up three draft picks and two starting players for the opportunity to get Carson Wentz - an enormous risk, given the unpredictability intrinsic to drafting a Division I-FCS quarterback who threw just 612 passes in his college career and missed half his senior season with a broken wrist. But in his debut Thursday night, Wentz looked pretty good: tough, mobile, an arm as strong as advertised. That toughness also led to a fractured rib. So, we'll see.
Conversely, sometimes we'll make sound decisions, and they won't work out as well as we'd hoped. In hoarding draft picks during his three years as the Sixers' GM, Hinkie chose a logical course of action: He tried to play the odds to acquire one or more franchise players, and it wasn't until after he resigned that the Sixers finally ended up with the NBA draft's No. 1 overall pick.
So here they are, and it could be that their unbalanced roster is a defect that will have to be repaired. But I'm curious to see what Brown might do with these guys. Would a lineup with four players 6-foot-10 or taller (Embiid, Saric, Noel, and Simmons - the latter two of whom have the speed and athleticism to defend the entire floor) be possible, and what problems might that create for opposing teams? Would the collective passing skill that Brown cited help to nullify the Sixers' relative lack of perimeter shooting? Who knows? It seems there's some room for innovation here, if the Sixers are willing to try.
Then again, maybe I'm just bat-poop crazy.
@MikeSielski