It's Brett Brown's Job To Figure This Team Out

Ben Simmons is ready to change. Can Brett Brown do it too?

[art by @digrupert]

Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA.

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For a team that’s already played 65 games, the Sixers sure are doing a lot of experimenting. It’s not often that a winning team will switch to a brand new starting lineup with zero prior minutes together just before the playoffs begin. 

But as uncommon as that type of decision is, it is indisputably the correct one. As much as anything else, the move to commit to Shake Milton over Al Horford in the starting lineup is an admission of what we all already knew: the original iteration of the Sixers’ starting lineup just did not work. The bully-ball experiment failed.  

While I do believe Brett Brown failed to get the most out of that group, there was no formula that was going to turn that lineup into a winning bunch. There was ultimately no code to crack. It just didn’t make sense.

With the addition of Shake Milton -- should Milton continue his strong season, of course -- this Sixers team gets a breath of fresh life. It’s a new opportunity for the coaching staff to structure an offense with a group that actually fits. With Milton now playing point guard, all members of the starting lineup slide into or near their natural position. 

Brown and company will most certainly have their work cut out for themselves in acclimating this lineup in such a short time. Here in this piece, we’ll take a look at what exactly Brown couldn’t figure out with the original lineup, and what that tells us about whether he has it in him to fix this new and improved group.

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It is indeed possible for both of these things to be true: the Simmons-Richardson-Harris-Horford-Embiid lineup was destined to fail from the beginning, and yet Brown failed to get the most out of them. Here’s how I summarized Brown’s strategic errors a few weeks after the season was suspended.

“His insistence on over-feeding the post and sending multiple cutters was head-scratching, especially in the beginning of the year. His desire to have Horford play deep drop coverages in the pick-and-roll — which Brown claimed he would adjust, but did not — has been strange. I’ve disagreed with having slow, methodical movers like Tobias Harris and Richardson play out of dribble hand-offs instead of pick-and-rolls. Simply put, while the 76ers would likely face many of the same pitfalls regardless of the coach, you’d be hard-pressed to point to any area of their performance this season where they’ve performed above expectations based on Brown’s decision-making. There is no feather in his cap.”

To expand on that final point: what could one have pointed to this season as evidence of them being a well-coached team? They played a horrendously clunky offense, they had a truly joyless vibe, the players openly acknowledged a lack of leadership and accountability, they could barely handle a 2-3 zone, they repeatedly blew leads, and had a handful of miserable late game collapses. Brown deserves a very real portion of the blame for this season being the trainwreck that it was. 

But again, the hope for Brown and the team as a whole is that the time off allows them to recalibrate, and that the introduction of Milton will allow this team to take a different shape. Despite his inability to maximize the original starters, can he do so with this group?

The decision to start Milton and move Simmons to power forward is a positive first step, and will ease many of their issues naturally. But there’s much more that needs to be done on a strategic level. For starters, the Sixers need to stabilize their movement around post-ups for Embiid. In years past, Brown drew heat for the fact that players would stand essentially completely still around the perimeter while Embiid would post up. But those instances were far better than whatever the hell this is: 

Example # 12943 of the Sixers doing bizarre stuff with off-ball spacing around post-ups. Two things on this play:
1) FVV doubles one pass away off Korkmaz. If he doesn't cut, it's a wide open three.
2) While that happens, Thybulle sets a screen to free Simmons in the corner (??) pic.twitter.com/1iexij8foW

— Mike O'Connor (@MOConnor_NBA) November 26, 2019

The Sixers did less and less of this as the season wore on, but the lack of spacing and structure around post-ups continued to be a lingering issue. They simply need to bring things back to the basics -- spread the floor and let Embiid go to work. 

I’m also of the belief that Brown desperately needs to open up the offense for more traditional pick and rolls for Harris, Richardson, Milton, and even Simmons. Brown’s insistence on running an offense based around dribble hand-offs was successful back when the Sixers’ offense revolved around players like JJ Redick, Marco Belinelli, or Landry Shamet -- elite shooters who force defenses to guard them immediately around the hand-off. But now that their offense is structured around players like Harris and Richardson -- players who are best at scoring while moving downhill, as opposed to launching mid-range jumpers while curling around hand-offs -- there needs to be a transition here. 

Harris, for example, handled 5.1 pick and rolls per game with the Clippers in 2018-19, compared to just 3.4 per game this season with the Sixers, per NBA.com. They have cut down on his best offensive skill, and both he and the team are worse for it.

My expectation is that Brown will adjust some to add more pick and rolls, but not much. He has been committed to this structure for too long. With the lack of change to his offense despite the massive amounts of personnel change over the past few seasons, it seems he is largely locked into this offensive play style built around DHOs. 

Perhaps Simmons’ move to power forward will lead to a slight uptick so that Brown can keep him involved in the offense by making him a screen setter. Either way, I’m not optimistic on Brown upping the pick and rolls to the point of making a major difference. 

The other area in which Brown has crucial decisions to make is in the outskirts of his rotations. Last week, Brown said to reporters that he expects Embiid to play around 38 minutes per game in the postseason. He also told reporters yesterday that Embiid and Horford have not been practicing in the same lineups at all so far in their practices. That, of course, would leave the 109 million dollar man coming off the bench for about ten minutes per game.

The optics of that are hideous, considering that the Sixers should be looking to trade Horford in the offseason. But it’s the right move -- lineups featuring Embiid and Horford together scored just 101.1 points per 100 possessions, per Cleaning The Glass. More than anything, I’m just glad that all of our eyeballs will no longer be subjected to watching that front court pairing. 

Brown also still has to decide which of Furkan Korkmaz, Matisse Thybulle, Glenn Robinson III, Mike Scott, and Alec Burks will receive time off the bench. My gut says that he leans on his veterans -- Scott and Burks, especially. Korkmaz will get time because of his shooting, but as has been the case with all his young rotation players, Brown will have a quick hook should Korkmaz come out cold or make some youth-borne mistakes in the playoffs. The same goes for Thybulle. 

The good news is that between starting Milton and scrapping the Horford-Embiid lineups, Brown is making the right decisions as it pertains to his rotations. He’s introducing more guard play, more spacing, and, well, less Al Horford. Prioritizing floor spacing and ball handling is exactly what this team needed.

But while those things are a positive first step, making major playstyle alterations requires a deeper willingness for change than does adjusting the rotation. In order to get the most out of this team, Brown needs to make life easier for Embiid by stabilizing the movement on post-ups. He needs to make life easier for Richardson and Harris by substituting their dribble hand-offs for more pick and rolls. And he needs to make better use of Horford on the defensive end by not putting him in deep drop coverages. 

Brown has had some, but not a ton of willingness to change those things in the past. Last year’s series against the Raptors was an example of the fact that he is indeed capable of making key adjustments on the fly. If he can push the right buttons for this team in such a short amount of time with such a strange and new group, it will be one of the biggest successes of his coaching tenure. The Sixers finally have a starting lineup that makes some sense, and it’s up to Brown to make the changes to optimize it.