If there’s one thing you learn from playing basketball with Scott O’Neil, it’s don’t get in Scott O’Neil’s way (and also don’t try to take him off the bounce). Right now, he’s headed backwards, intentionally, and he isn’t going to be stopped by recent comments made by the old-timey Larry Brown.

First, here’s Brown yelling at a cloud:

“I hate what’s going on in Philly,” the Hall of Fame coach said Wednesday. “They don’t have a basketball person in the organization. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

“These analytics, they don’t mean squat to me,” Brown said. “Throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. To say that these analytics guys have the answer is crazy. It doesn’t apply to basketball. Everybody uses the data you get, but that’s what coaching is. Maybe it will work, I don’t know. But it’s a shame what those fans are going through waiting to see if it will.”

Brown’s been here before. In June, he told the WIP Morning Show that advanced analytics are ruining sports. Maybe they are. But they also seem to be working for a lot of teams, in many sports. The Tampa Bay Rays are probably the best example of a team that used Wall Street philosophies to have sports success (read The Extra 2%— it’s great). They didn’t win the World Series (smirks), but they managed to improbably finish ahead of the Yankees or Red Sox, or both, four times since 2008. The same tactic hasn’t quite been proven in basketball, but there’s little reason to doubt that it can work, at least in theory. And that’s what the Sixers are doing– looking for inefficiencies in the system and exploiting them.

O’Neil, of course, is not just going to let those comments about his team float out there unanswered. Angelo Cataldi brought up Brown’s comments on his WIP Morning Show today, forcing O’Neil to call in and respond, viciously:

“You know, after seeing Larry Brown’s SMU team in the Final Four this year it was tough to hear those kind of comments. Was he in the Final Four this year? … You know, I think it’s hard for people not in the market to understand what we’re and how we’re doing it. I think the good thing about Philadelphia is that the fans certainly get it.”

You can shit talk many people in basketball, but Larry Brown is close to untouchable — but only “close to,” and O’Neil was right to defend his team’s strategy. In yesterday’s edition of the Crossing Streams podcast, we discussed (with Eliot Shorr-Parks, who broke down his own reaction to this here) the idea of taking emotion out of the equation and running a team like a business. It’s still yet to be seen if that is going to work for the Sixers, but the organization is at least taking a run (a long run, but a run) at the top of the league instead of trying to coach their way to the middle. But to defend Coach Brown, SMU was 27–10 last year, made it to the NIT Finals, and was ranked in the AP Poll for the first time in 30 years.

The full audio of O’Neil’s call is after the jump.