Depleted Sixers have overachieved | Bob Brookover
Brett Brown painted a pretty picture before his team's 75th game of the season Wednesday night against the Atlanta Hawks and it was not easy considering how few bristles the 76ers coach has left on his brush at this late stage of the season.
Brett Brown painted a pretty picture before his team's 75th game of the season Wednesday night against the Atlanta Hawks and it was not easy considering how few bristles the 76ers coach has left on his brush at this late stage of the season.
"This team has fought in a higher weight class all year," Brown said before describing how proud he is of a team that has a chance to get to 30 victories if it could win two of its final seven games.
The total remained at 28 after the depleted Sixers lost, 99-92, to the Hawks.
Thirty wins, of course, is a modest total in a lot of NBA cities, but it would be three times more than a year ago and 11 more than any of Brown's first three seasons as the head coach.
"I don't know if we can [get to 30]," Brown said. "A lot is going to depend on the health. Right now I'm sitting in front of you with 71/2 players."
Therein lies the beauty of this 76ers season.
Thirty wins with a healthy Joel Embiid would have been expected, especially if he continued to flash the form that helped carry the team through a 10-5 January before checking out of the lineup for good after just 31 games with a left knee injury that required surgery. Maybe 35 or even 40 wins would have been possible if first overall pick Ben Simmons had not checked out for the season with the foot injury he suffered in training camp.
Instead, the worst possible scenarios kept unfolding for Brown and the 76ers and still they remained respectable, competitive and worth watching. The 76ers went 13-18 with Embiid on the court and they are 15-29 without him. They are also 7-13 since the trade-deadline departures of Nerlens Noel and Ersan Ilyasova, the two guys you probably thought they could least afford to lose after Embiid and Simmons.
"If the season were to end today, this group has exceeded expectations all over the place and we will reap the benefit of that spirit and that attitude and that excitement with a very, very calculated and disciplined summer," Brown said. "This was completely a launching pad to catapult us into a very progressive and very detailed summer. That is where we're going to make our money."
Brown is such a good salesman he could probably convince an Atlantic City lifeguard he needed more sand and water in his life, but there is some merit to what he is peddling at the end of this season. Some would argue that the 76ers are messing everything up by winning when they should be losing and lining up for a better position in the draft lottery. Brown, on the other hand, sees the merits of victories, which are the very point of everything.
"It's just the real-time reminder that collective effort and collective mind-sets trump individual stuff," the coach said. "Let's just use our starters as examples."
By starters, he meant the five guys who opened Wednesday night's game on the court. That group consisted of Justin Anderson, Dario Saric, Richaun Holmes, Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot, and T.J. McConnell. The hobbled bench was shorter than Spud Webb.
Saric, who emerged as the leading candidate for rookie of the year after Embiid's season-ending injury, is the only guy likely to still be in the starting lineup if and when the Sixers ever reach the playoffs again.
That, however, should not diminish the value of what the others have done this season.
"T.J. has had a heck of a year and has improved," Brown said. "Timothe Luwawu has had a heck of a year and improved. Go back to what Robert [Covington] has done. Dario, as we've said, how can the rookie of the year not go through Philadelphia? That speaks for itself.
"Look at what Shawn Long has done since he has come back into this. Nik Stauskas is now a point guard and was a plus-10 [Tuesday] night and has had a heck of a year. And Gerald Henderson statistically has had his best year in the NBA. There's not anybody you'd say, 'Wow, he had a rough year this year.' Not any of them."
Well, let's not forget about Jahlil Okafor.
But it is true what Brown said about the others. To a man, they have exceeded expectations, and from that group could come the roster depth needed to build an NBA contender.
"I feel like the excitement of this group overachieving is going to better let me set the table," Brown said.
Of course, if Embiid, Simmons, and the 2017 first-round draft pick do not show up at that table healthy and ready to play from the start next season, the roster depth that Brown and his coaching staff built this season will have little meaning. That is a scenario Brown is unwilling to envision near the end of a season that has revved his coaching engine. He much prefers painting the prettier picture even when so many bristles have fallen from his brush.
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