After 11 games the most common question from observers of the Sixers is pretty straight forward.
How much more can Brett Brown take?
Three seasons into the Sixers’ epic rebuild has Brown taking it on the chin over and over again. At 0-11, Brown is the first coach in NBA history to preside over a team that lost nine games to start a season two years in a row. More telling, with a 37-138 record, Brown would have to win 50 games for the next four seasons just to get over .500.
And that includes this season.
The head coaches of the last two teams the Sixers have faced — Gregg Popovich of the Spurs and Rick Carlisle of the Mavericks — have expressed wonderment at the job and predicament Brown has performed with the Sixers.
But to borrow a phrase, it is what it is for Brown. With 21 straight losses dating back to last season, the Sixers have not cracked. There is no in-fighting or dissension in the ranks. No one is second-guessing the coach and everyone with the team is on board with Brown’s program.
Actually, it’s Brown that has kept the Sixers together despite the mounting losses in the seemingly never ending rebuilding process the team has undertaken with general manager Sam Hinkie.
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“He’s keeping us together and he keeps us motivated,” rookie T.J. McConnell said. “We’re a motivated group and we all love each other and play hard for each other. We want to win for these fans and for us — it’s easy to get down after a loss, but we’re staying together and we work hard everyday.”
McConnell, an undrafted point guard, has been one of the NBA’s best stories through the first part of the season. However, one has to wonder if McConnell would have gotten the same chance to prove himself if he had landed with another team looking for a point guard. Yet with Brown, McConnell is just one more player to show that he belongs in the NBA.
Somehow and some way, Brown has the Sixers believing in themselves every day. One night after committing 27 turnovers in a loss that slipped away down the stretch to the Mavericks, the players showed up at Tuesday’s practice session bounding with energy and ready to go.
“He’s the most positive individual I know,” Popovich said told reporters in San Antonio last Saturday. “I honestly don't know who else could be in Philadelphia doing what he's doing. I couldn’t.
“I’d last about a month. And he, honest to God, loves coaching that team.”
The Sixers, the youngest and least experienced team in the NBA, appear to love playing for Brown.
“We don’t have one bad dude here and everyone is positive and motivated and has a great attitude everyday,” McConnell said. “We’re struggling right now, but there are a lot of teams that would have folded by now, but we’re still fighting.”
Perhaps the reason why the Sixers are still fighting and showing up at practice everyday just as enthusiastic as ever is because of that youth. Youthful exuberance, Brown said, is good in allowing him to adjust on the fly or to try to create order in chaotic situations that the Sixers are entrenched in with the injuries and the roster.
But that might be about the only thing it’s good for.
“That side of it that they don’t know what they don’t know and they come into the gym like an excited puppy, they are good to go most days no matter what happened the night before,” Brown said after Tuesday’s practice. “That might be the only positive I can think of and that’s a big one. There are times when you have 27 turnovers or you have to lock in to start a third period that youth doesn’t help you.”
Then again, an experienced team might not be able to bounce back from 27 turnovers and routine languid starts to third quarters. Somehow the Sixers have shown the ability to fight through things that cripple other teams.
There hasn’t been a victory to show for it yet, but the team still is turning up game after game and practice after practice ready to go through it again.
Brown kind of likes that about his team.
“If you gave me a choice and I say, ‘Wow, that’s just a beautiful, well-oiled offensive machine, but boy are they soft and they don’t play any defense.’ I’d rather not have that,” Brown said. “I’d rather my problems be let’s keep growing and take our chances with 27 turnovers and all that over soft and non-competitive. I’d take that flipside any day of the week.”
Still, at 54 and heading into the third year of his NBA career, Brown has been able to stay positive even though his team is winless since last March and the reason for that is more than Xs and Os or bottom-line type things.
For Brown it’s about loyalty and honor.
“The belief in the guys that I have here [is how I stay positive],” Brown said. “I see improvement and their desire to compete and work to get better. We talk only and always about their attitude and effort and they bring it so I have to bring it back for them. I feel sometimes that they need me to be strong and they need me to believe in them so those beliefs sort of govern your day.”
So maybe Popovich is right. Brown is coaching the Sixers because that’s where he needs to be and there is no one else who could do it.
How much more can he take?
Maybe all of it.