Brett Brown has often frankly talked in recent years about the pressures and expectations that come with coaching the Sixers.
“There’s an expiration date on all of us,” he said in September.
Brown’s expiration date was XXX day, when the Sixers fired him as their head coach, [XX attribution.]
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SIGN UP HERE He was hired before the 2013-14 season by then-general manager Sam Hinkie. In his first three seasons on the job, he earned just 47 victories. Hinkie, with a long-term vision in mind, gave Brown a frequently rotating cast of players not meant to win games.
A native of South Portland, Maine, Brown began his coaching career in Australia and had experience as a director of player development and assistant coach with the San Antonio Spurs. That background helped prepare him for a difficult job.
The 2016-17 Sixers won 28 games, an 18-win improvement on the previous season. Behind young stars Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid, Brown then led the Sixers to back-to-back 50-win seasons for the first time since 1984-86.
Following a bizarre scandal involving then-president of basketball operations Bryan Colangelo and burner Twitter accounts, Brown assumed the role of interim general manager in June of 2018 until the team hired Elton Brand.
NBA
Brown’s players endorsed him strongly last May when there had been speculation about his job being at risk. The Sixers were a Kawhi Leonard buzzer-beater away from heading to overtime in Game 7 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series against the eventual champion Toronto Raptors.
Entering this season, Brown guaranteed expectations would be high for himself and the Sixers when he said, “I want the No. 1 seed.”
The team had gone 39-26 and was sixth in the Eastern Conference standings before the coronavirus pandemic caused the NBA to suspend its season on March 11.
"I’ve been in this city for seven years," Brown said on May 5. "We’ve gone through naviculars and pandemics and fired GMs and 100-whatever players, and here we are. I feel that it’s incomplete. We need to be able to come back to the table, take the team that we have, the work that we’ve been putting in, and let that be judgement day. Let that environment be, you did or didn’t type stuff. And that’s how I approach it.”
[XX DETAILS OF PLAYOFF LOSS/END OF SEASON.]
Brown has been unable to produce regular offensive fluidity for his team. He said earlier this season that he’d shifted from his preferred philosophy of relying on “organic” offense in favor of running more plays, but that change didn’t create sustained success.
He promised “smash mouth offense” and “bully ball defense,” a vision his team ultimately did not meet.
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