Whether you like him or not, Brett Brown is here to stay.

The Sixers’ head coach was never in jeopardy of losing his job, assured by managing partner Josh Harris that he would be returning for a 7th NBA season no matter what happened in the playoffs.

For whatever reason, people in this region seem to be totally split on Brett Brown. He’s either loved by Process types or totally hated by old school Philadelphia sports fans. Then people accuse the media of being in the bag for him because “he’s a nice guy,” which I read on Twitter every third day. I feel like zero Brett Brown middle ground exists, like our 2019 political climate, where you’re either a Republican or a Democrat and moderate ideas get shouted down by both sides via partisan frothing.

So it’s with a neutral approach that I’ll try to explain why I think the stated problems with Brett exist on a macro-level scale, a more general philosophical plane rather than than one exhibiting more discernible shortcomings.

To start, let’s actually go backwards, let’s start micro, and I want to use Mike O’Connor’s story from The Athletic, titled “The Ten Things We Learned About the Sixers During Their 2019 Playoff Run.” Mike is one of the best basketball minds in town, and he lists the following as adjustments Brett made in the Brooklyn and Toronto series:

  • Benching T.J. McConnell after Game 1 of the Nets series and playing Butler as backup point guard
  • Shifting to more aggressive off-ball defensive schemes against Brooklyn
  • Picking apart the Nets by adding layers to their “Hawk” play against Brooklyn in Game 3
  • Shifting Simmons onto Leonard at halftime of Game 1 against Toronto (And subsequently tweaking the rotation to align Simmons’ and Leonard’s minutes)
  • Slotting Embiid on Pascal Siakam, and Tobias Harris on Gasol starting in Game 2 against Toronto
  • Sending double teams against virtually every mismatch starting in Game 2 against Toronto
  • Benching Boban Marjanovic for Greg Monroe in Game 2 against Toronto
  • In general, shifting to an offense based more on the pick-and-roll throughout the playoffs

All of that is 100% spot on, and I’ll add a few, after the jump:

  1. Mike mentioned this above, matching Simmons’ and Leonard’s minutes, but Brett also changed his general subbing patterns against Toronto, leaving three starters in the game alongside Greg Monroe and James Ennis to match Nick Nurse’s strategy of playing his starting unit for the majority of the first quarter. JJ Redick and Joel Embiid, for instance, initially exited, then came back in at the 2:49 mark in the 1st quarter of game two.
  2. In the fourth quarters of several Toronto games, Brett opened with four starters against two Raptors starters, which helped push leads while Kawhi was off the floor.
  3. Mike also mentioned this as a sidebar in his story, but they didn’t switch screens with Redick, they instead had him hedge and recover. That worked pretty well in the half court, but it’s very difficult to do in transition.
  4. To add to Mike’s first bullet, the Sixers didn’t have James Ennis for game one. He came back in game two on a minutes restriction and replaced Jonathon Simmons.
  5. Jonah Bolden was used at power forward with the starters to open the second and fourth quarters of some Brooklyn games. Redick remained on the bench to begin those stretches.

This was micro level stuff, small X’s and O’s types of things that Brett got mostly right in the playoffs. I thought he made the appropriate tweaks throughout the course of 12 games.

Of course, when it comes to making adjustments, the counter argument usually goes something like this:

Well, they had to lose game one to force adjustments. They were on the back foot.” Or, “If they had showed up in game one, Toronto and Brooklyn would have been forced to adjust instead.”

That’s true. The Sixers found themselves down 1-0 in each series and had to make the first set of changes. They were unable to put the early pressure on their opponent and obligate the first adjustment to Kenny Atkinson or Nick Nurse instead. Brett certainly could have had some foresight to say, “you know, I don’t think Boban is gonna work in this Toronto series,” but you can’t truly know until you put him out on the floor and see what happens. That’s why I think a lot of of these “rotational” problems fall more on your general manager, who leaves you with a short bench filled with question marks. There was no solid backup for Embiid in the playoffs. Should Zhaire Smith have been activated? Why did Furkan Korkmaz play? In the end, Brett appropriately crunched his rotation down to 7.5 players for the finale against Toronto.

When I look back on the Eastern Conference semifinals, I really don’t think the Sixers lost because of Brett Brown. I don’t think he was “outcoached” by Nick Nurse. I’d say the coaching battle was probably a wash, and I think the Raptors made a few more big plays when it mattered. They finally got something out of their bench. I think the Sixers missed some open shots at the end of game four. Joel Embiid wasn’t healthy. I’d put the game seven execution on the players more than the coach, if we’re being honest, since two of the final plays we talked about in that matchup were simple designs the Sixers have run plenty of times before.

Brett, in my opinion, got the micro-level stuff more or less correct.

The complaints I see on social media and hear on the radio are macro level. People hate dribble hand offs. They want Embiid to get his “fat ass on the blocks.” They hate turnovers, which the Sixers have stated they are willing to live with as a byproduct of their play style. They don’t think he draws up elite-level plays out of timeouts and in half-court scenarios. They don’t feel like the team was “ready to play” in game five. They don’t like Brett’s offensive philosophies in general, which he himself explained and doubled down on earlier this week.

And that’s fine. You are perfectly justified in feeling the way you do. If you don’t like how Brett approaches the game with this mix of personnel, there’s nothing wrong with your opinion.

That leaves us with, again, a macro-level clash of ideas. If you’re a fan of pick and roll and isolation basketball, and you think Embiid should spend more time in the paint, that’s all good and well. If you would cut down on passing and transition in an effort to limit turnovers, fine. It doesn’t necessarily mean Brett’s a “bad coach,” because I don’t think he is, it means you and Brett have a different approach to the modern day NBA. Neither side is necessarily “right” or “wrong,” because there are various ways to play the game.

Brett is not a micro-manager and he has generally been a hands-off type of coach. He thinks play calling is overrated, as stated many times before:

“In general, I think that play-calls can be dangerous to flow and feel and movement and pace,” Brown said. “Organic basketball interests me way more than play-calls.”

This is one area where I disagree with him, and it’s probably my biggest concern with Brett moving forward.

It’s fine to trust your players. I like that part of it, but I personally think this becomes a problem when the half court offense becomes stuck in 1st gear and sometimes Brett lets his team try to play their way out of it. I think he can do more to get the offense unstuck, whether that’s calling bread and butter horns sets or double staggers or simple things that get the team to start organically moving and passing again. Brett puts a lot of trust in a 22-year-old, non-shooting point guard to grease the wheels on the fly, and while Ben is getting better at being a floor general, this is one area of the game where a coach can really get involved.

Brett is more of an “install a philosophy and stick to it” type of guy. Jay Wright, the trendy pick to replace him, is not dissimilar. They both run variations of a motion offense. The concepts of spacing and sharing the basketball are very much alike. Big East coaches have noted that the Wildcats have maybe a half-dozen calls in their playbook, which is evidenced in how they freely approach the bulk of their games. They don’t need plays because they trust their base offense and their philosophical approach. They trust players to make the right reads and the right cuts, when to attack and whatnot. It’s similarly organic to what the Sixers do.

But playoff NBA basketball is more half court stuff, more isolation, more pick and roll, more grind-it-out possessions. Game seven looked more like Syracuse vs. Pitt in the 2010 Big East tournament, rather than a typical regular season, no defense NBA game. That’s where I think Brett’s space and pace offense loses a bit of steam, because you just aren’t getting Ben Simmons his easy bullshit transitional buckets, the ones he gets against the likes of Chicago, New York, and Charlotte. Brett’s style is more suited to the regular season rather than playoff basketball, and even though it’s similar to what the Warriors run, Golden State has multiple future Hall of Famers in their starting five.

In that way, I think Brett can evolve a bit, and he did move in that direction this year. People were clamoring for Jimmy Butler pick and roll and that’s what you got – Jimmy Butler pick and roll. He moved away from his favorite ’12’ play with Simmons and Redick, calling it only a few times in the Toronto series. He didn’t call for a lot of elbow with Embiid and Redick. Oftentimes, Brett was okay with Butler orchestrating late-game situations while sprinkling in calls when necessary, such as the Brooklyn game four sequence where he ran that dual-action elbow set three times in a row. They threw in some hawk cuts and used Ben Simmons as a screener. The wrinkles are there, so it’s not like they are incapable of getting deeper into X’s and O’s.

Before making my final point, I’ll say this –

I think people generally overvalue the impact of NBA coaching in general. How much coaching did Nick Nurse do in game seven? Did he draw up some amazing sideline play with 4 seconds remaining? Nope. They got the ball to Kawhi, he traveled, then ran into the corner and hit a ridiculous fadeaway shot. Similarly, Mike D’Antoni doesn’t even coach James Harden, he just lets him do his thing. How much did Tyronn Lue manage LeBron James in 2015?

A third macro idea, and most important, is something I can’t define. You can’t define it either, and it’s Brett’s behind the scenes approach with Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. How hard does he push Joel to take care of his body? Is he “too close” to Simmons since he has history with the family? Furthermore, is Ben even a point guard? Should Joel be allowed to take as many threes as he does? Will he ever shoot well enough from beyond the arc to justify a four-in, one-out formula with Ben sitting in the paint? Embiid shot a career-worst 30% from three this season.

This is captain obvious stuff, but Brett is hitching his wagon to the idea that Joel and Ben will grow their games to the point where the overlap in skill set is feasibly less redundant, to the point where it solves a lot of the offensive spacing issues that exist because of Ben’s unique skill set. Somebody needs to improve their shot, and Brett doesn’t seem to care whether it’s Ben or Joel, judging from comments made this year and at Tuesday’s exit interviews.

Brett Brown likes his concepts. “The pass is king,” you’ll hear him say. Turnovers are a necessary evil that come with the territory. Simmons’ jump shot doesn’t need to be priority #1 moving forward. It’s okay if Joel hovers a bit because he’s not going to be an 82-game rim runner. These are all things Brett has stated many times before, and he’s tripled and even quadrupled down on these philosophies over the years.

You don’t have to like it, but it’s what you’re getting. We all should know by now who Brett Brown is as a coach.