Seven years after Brett Brown was hired to be the Philadelphia 76ers head coach, the team is on the brink of another playoff elimination. Since Ben Simmons was sidelined to a season-ending knee injury, the team has struggled mightily. They slumped through the final regular-season games and are now down 3-0 against the Boston Celtics in the opening series.
Without Simmons, the team is lost. They’ve been unable to stop Jayson Tatum whose averaged over 26 points per game in the series. In Game 3, the team led by 2 points with two minutes to go. However, the Cetlics would go on a 10-0 run and win the game 102-94. This game was added to the list of countless games lost because of Brett Brown’s poor coaching and inability to make in-game adjustments.
Brett Brown was the coach selected to lead the Sixers massive rebuild with the entire roster wiped out in a three-year period. Fans and the media gave him a lot of credit despite the losing because he was coaching with little to no talent. Joel Embiid — the third overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft — sat out his first two seasons with lingering injuries and delayed the rebuild progress.
Over recent years, the Sixers have struggled to hold leads in the 2nd Half. In the 2015-16 season, they led the league in blown leads with 18 games lost despite having a lead of over 10 points in the same game. The next season, the team had the 4th most blown leads in the league. Some of that blame can go on the young players with inexperience but, how long can we play that game?
This is the third playoff appearance for the Sixers under Brett Brown. And again, Brown has been easily out-coached by the opposition. In the first two appearances, the team breezed through the opening series but struggled against their second opponents. They struggled because Brown was unable to out-coach Brett Stevens and Nick Nurse. You can blame “the shot” by Kawhi Leonard in 2019 but the team blew late leads multiple times in that series.
What it comes down to is, will the Sixers be better off if they fire Brett Brown? The current coaching market is thin, especially after the Knicks hired Tom Thibodeau. A few names the Sixers could look at this offseason to replace Brown could be Villanova’s Jay Wright or Kenny Atkinson.
RELATED: Players welcomed to the NBA Bubble with cafeteria meals