NBA
PREVIEW
Richardson. They were a Kawhi Leonard miracle shot away
from the 2019 conference finals and enter this season as a
popular pick to win the East.
But as his team has heated up, so has Brown’s seat. A
sizable group of Philly fans—or at least a vocal group, all
with access to Twitter—wanted him fired after Brad Stevens
outcoached him in the Sixers’ 2018 second-round loss to the
Celtics. And The New York Times reported before last season’s
Game 7 loss to Toronto that he was all but gone in the event
of a Game 7 loss.
But Brown is still here, tasked
with molding a roster that features
a never-before-seen combination of
size and talent. How he makes his
giants fit together—or fails to—will
determine not just the fate of the
Sixers, but his own future.
Few coaches, if any, have sur-
vived a tanking process and gone
on to win a championship. Brown
has at least one more chance to try.“He’s great,” Brown replies, smiling. He loves talking about
his father, Bob Brown, a legendary high school basketball
coach in their home state of Maine. “Thank you for asking. I
took him whitewater rafting this summer. The only 82-year-
old to go on a class-5 rapid.”
The men are sufficiently impressed. Brown turns around
to continue explaining the drill to his staff. He doesn’t make
it up to the party for another 15 minutes, then keeps a low
profile in the back of the room until it’s time to introduce
Lange. Taking the podium, Brown
comes alive. His eyes narrow and
intensify as he looks around and
smiles. He launches into a joke—he
often launches into jokes—about
a Canadian guy he coached with
years ago.
“He told this story that’s kind of
true for both of us,” Brown says, in
his very particular accent, a confus-
ing mix of Mainer and Australian
that Spurs legend Tim Duncan de-
scribes as “Bos-tralian.”
“The coach comes home,” Brown
continues, “and his wife says, after
[he’s spent] many hours in the gym,
‘You love basketball more than you
love me.’ He doesn’t blink. He says,
‘That might be true, but I love you
more than I love hockey.’
“And he’s from Canada, so that’s
pretty good!”
Brown has a lot of material to pull
from when it comes to global sports
jokes. He grew up playing for his
father in high school and for Rick
Pitino at Boston University before
going on to coach in Australia for 17 years, serving as the
head coach of NBL teams and the Australian national team.
He’s been in the NBA since 2002, when he joined the Spurs,
where he was head of player development and one of Gregg
Popovich’s assistant coaches (and close friends). Brown is
now entering his seventh season as coach of the Sixers, where
he was hired by former general manager Sam Hinkie at the
beginning of his unprecedented project in tanking: a multi-
year process of bottoming out designed to collect draft picks
and eventually build up a Larry O’Brien Trophy–caliber team.
Even if you don’t follow basketball, you know that “trust
the Process” meant so much suffering that Philly fans
started to wonder what exactly they were trusting. But
over the last two years, the Sixers have become contenders.
They have two gigantic All-Stars in Ben Simmons and Joel
Embiid, and though they lost Jimmy Butler’s (mercurial)
star power, they retained Tobias Harris and picked up de-
pendable big man Al Horford, as well as 6' 6" guard Josh
56SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED- OC T OBER 21–28, 2019
MITCHELL LEFF/GETTY IMAGESTHREE CHEERS
Unlocking Simmons’s
potential—and his
jump shot—may prove
to be the key to the
Sixers’ season. When
he finally hit a three in
a preseason game,
the team rang a
bell in celebration.