This Is When You Fire the Coach
Glenn Rivers is still patrolling it all from the sidelines, wondering if he'll get blamed for all this.
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The Sixers suffered their first bad loss of the season last night -- at least, if you subscribe to Joel Embiid's notion that their season only officially started on Tuesday with the home win against Phoenix, following the Phils' World Series elimination (which I do). Like many Sixers Ls you may or may not consider canon from the last month, it was a good mix of excusable and inexcusable: They lost to a good team on the road while shorthanded and with some shots just not falling, but also did the team really have to fall apart that completely whenever Joel was on the bench and what the fuck happened in that fourth quarter. Ultimately, it was the kind of loss that probably doesn't really mean that much, but also makes you question every decision you made in your life that led to you watching the game and caring about the result. It won't be the last this season. Maybe not the last this week.
So here the Sixers sit at 5-7 (or 1-1, depending), with the squad many expected to be a regular season juggernaut showing signs of neither juggering nor nauting. It's a tough schedule ahead, there's no James Harden for the next month, and the excitement I had a week ago over a Maxey-Melton backcourt... it's still probably there somewhere, just buried under an avalanche of missed layups. Embiid is back to being good enough to do it all by himself -- until he can't, and then he really can't. And Dr. Glenn Rivers is still patrolling it all from the sidelines, wondering if he'll get blamed for all this.
Doc's the rare figuring uniting Sixers Twitter and Sixers talk radio in their mutual disgust; Tobias Harris could fumble a potentially game-winning layup out of bounds in the final minute and the big discussion topic after the game would still be Doc's decision to play Paul Reed and Montrezl Harrell together for 90 seconds in the third. I can't remember the last time a coach's approval rating here was quite this low; even Bynum-era Doug Collins looks like the Phillie Phanatic in comparison. There is a bloodthirst in the City of Brotherly Love right now that no amount of Keith Pompey damage control can sate; only with Doc Rivers' dismissal will it be satisfied.
And I agree: It's probably time to let Doc go. The team is inert, corroding, and very ready for new direction. But I think we're over-emphasizing how much of that is really about Doc, as much as it's about, well... sometimes firing the coach is just kinda the move.
It's not like we didn't see this possibility coming. I predicted over the summer that part of the reason Daryl Morey kept Doc around in the first place -- after a second straight postseason showing most would consider unacceptable, if not entirely inexplicable -- would be to have him around to fire about a month into the season if things weren't going well, the team needed a kick in the ass, and/or the situation called for a fall guy. I'm also far from the only one to point out that Morey was in a similar situation with Kevin McHale at the outset of the Houston Rockets' 2015-'16 season, booting the respected coach following a 4-7 start -- just a year after the team made a surprise run to the Western Conference Finals (including a shocking comeback from down 3-1 over Doc's own Clippers). Like the Sixers this season, it was too early to do anything really dramatic with the players on the floor, but it was also too late to pretend that level of stagnation could just be ignored. Sometimes, firing the coach is just the best card available to play. Sometimes it's the only card.
Mike O'Connor had a really smart column a couple weeks ago basically cautioning the over-enthusiastic among us to not get too excited about the impact of bringing in a different coach -- that the Sixers' problems are more personnel-based than schematic, and that while Rivers arguably suffers from a lack of imagination or innovation, he's not actually doing anything on the court to actively bring the team down. I agreed with all of his individual points, but I disagreed with his over-arching point that moving on from Doc would have minimal impact. Because we've seen countless examples in pro sports that a midseason coaching change isn't a means to an upgrade -- it's the end in itself.
MOC brings up the most obvious example himself in his article: Rob Thomson replacing Joe Girardi in the middle of the Phillies season and the team taking off as a result. Obviously Thomson was the better manager for the Phillies this season, but does that make him a better manager in general? Not necessarily; it's all contextual and momentum-based. Girardi's relationship with the veteran players had corroded and his lack of faith in the young guys proved detrimental, while Thomson's trust in his blue-chippers, hands-off attitude with his established guys and general reluctance to tinker day-to-day ended up being exactly what they needed this year. But maybe next year, it ends with him riding a fourth starter or two-hole hitter into the ground as fans scream at him to switch it up already. The team loves Topper's unflappable and even-keeled demeanor and general approachability while they're riding high; once they get in a rut, who's to say if he's the guy to haul them out of it? In a different year, with a different team, maybe Thomson is the guy the team and fans have had enough of and Girardi is the guy they bring in to straighten things out. The Phillies can't know if Thomson's the long-term answer yet, they can only know that firing Girardi was absolutely the short-term answer.
The point is, that's kinda just coaching in general: It's not about who's good or who's bad at it. I don't think Morey views Doc as a bad coach, nor do I think he believed Kevin McHale suddenly got terrible when he fired him in 2015. Rather, it's about who's right or wrong for it with a given team at a given point in time -- and once you become the wrong guy, it's pretty hard to ever get right again. That's why when Brett Brown was fired in 2020, none of us at the Ricky really got up in arms about it, even though we all loved Brett as a guy and generally still respected him as a coach. It was just time; he'd gotten his chances, he'd gotten what he could out of the team, and things weren't trending in the right direction. It was time for him to go, no matter who was gonna come next. It sucked -- I'm not in favor of anyone getting fired from their job for reasons outside of gross incompetence or abuse of their position. But in sports coaching, that's unfortunately how it works: it's more important to identify that you need a new voice than it is to identify who that new voice should be.
Would firing Doc Rivers automatically fix what ails the Sixers? Of course not; even in that previously mentioned McHale season, the Rockets under interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff finished the season 41-41 and got waxed by Golden State in the first round of the playoffs. But it'd give 'em a chance, an opening, a possibility to discover a new identity, a new momentum, with plenty of time still to build on it. Firing your coach midseason is the sports equivalent to turning the computer off and on again; it's not a guaranteed solution, but it might do the trick -- and if it doesn't, hell, things clearly weren't working right as it was anyway. I don't think Doc Rivers is the biggest problem with the team right now, but he's the simplest to alleviate. And if nothing else, a coaching change would be another excuse for Joel Embiid to once again reset the counter on the entire Sixers season.