April 12, 2017
Before Monday night’s game against the Indiana Pacers, the second-to-last date on the Sixers schedule and the final game of the 2016-17 season at the Wells Fargo Center, Brett Brown was asked something fairly simple in the pregame media scrum.
Do you think that your team has been unlucky this season, Brett?
It’s a great, straightforward question. Even the most cynical fan, still unhappy about the return for Nerlens Noel and questioning the medical staff at every turn, can admit that the Sixers have been at least somewhat snakebitten. Just look at what happened to their two best players.
• Ben Simmons steps on Shawn Long’s foot the last practice of training camp and his rookie season goes kaput in Galloway Township, New Jersey of all places. Complete freak injury.
• Joel Embiid, in the middle of running away with the Rookie of Year, turns out to be legitimately too powerful for his knee to hold up. Embiid tears his meniscus because he dunked too hard, like a 10-year-old on a Nerf hoop.
Anyway, Brown eventually got around to answering the question about luck (or specifically, lack thereof) and we’ll get to that first, but it should be noted that happened only after the fourth-year Sixers head coach took a long detour. Just keep that in mind, but for now, back to his answer.
“Yes, I think in many ways we’ve had some hard luck,” Brown said. “To blink on opening week and you lose your starting point guard and 3-man/4-man in Ben [Simmons] and Jerryd [Bayless].
“But you know, things happen for a reason. We’re going to move on and I think nobody is wanting in this pity party. I feel like we’ll all look back and we’ll forget quick and be excited about I hope draft night.”
In other words, “Yes, but it’s not the end of the world.” And that answer got me thinking about a big picture question: Is the Sixers season a success?
On the positive side of the ledger, you have Embiid looking every bit of a Top-5 player, Dario Saric showing a ton of promise as everyone around him has dropped like flies, and a renewed energy at the Wells Fargo Center as well as within the Sixers fan base as a whole. But then it’s hard to overlook like Embiid’s injury (along with seemingly everyone else’s), not being able to see Simmons play point guard, and Jahlil Okafor riding the struggle bus.
It’s complicated. And today and tomorrow, we’ll go a little more in-depth on both the positives and negatives we can take from year four of The Process.
Oh yeah, that story. Brown was on one of his pregame runs on Broad Street, making the turn onto Pattison Avenue when a driver pulled up next to Brown, and while maintaining the coach’s pace, started talking Sixers with him.
"He wants to know if Ben Simmons can be a point guard and Dario is doing great, and ‘I love the way your team plays so hard.’ Like it went from scolding me to praising me to questioning what direction we’re going.”
Once Brown made the turn onto 11th Street, a policeman parked outside of Xfinity Live even put on his siren as a warning sign to the enthusiastic motorist. No problem, the driver followed Brown onto 11th and began questioning him about how the Sixers have handled injuries.
“It was so Philly,” Brown said. “He wants to know why I didn’t play two bigs together. He wants to know if Ben Simmons can be a point guard and Dario is doing great, and ‘I love the way your team plays so hard.’ Like it went from scolding me to praising me to questioning what direction we’re going.”
Brown doesn’t know exactly what his team will be, but he does seem more upbeat about the franchise’s direction than ever before. The 2016-17 Sixers season was far from an unmitigated success, but looking back on it, my main takeaway is pretty similar.
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