Bryan Gates and Matt Brase are joining Nick Nurse’s Sixers coaching staff, a source confirmed Wednesday night to NBC Sports Philadelphia.
ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski first reported that Gates, who’d accepted a job as a Mavericks assistant in early July, has now decided to come to Philadelphia. The Mavs “freed Gates for Nick Nurse’s staff to take a significant step up in role,” per Wojnarowski.
Brase’s tenure at Pallacanestro Varese ended after one season as head coach, the Italian club announced Wednesday, and BasketNews’ Orazio Cauchi reported shortly after that Brase was expected to take an assistant coaching role with the Sixers. That move had been rumored in recent days by Italian media outlets.
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Like Nurse, Gates had extensive experience as a head coach at sub-NBA levels before entering the league. He was named the D League’s Coach of the Year for the 2006-07 and '07-08 seasons.
Nurse worked under him back in the day, too. During the summers of 2001 and 2005, Nurse served as an assistant coach for Gates’ Oklahoma Storm team in the United States Basketball League.
“Bryan Gates as a head coach was very fiery, always ripping off his jacket and throwing it down,” Tom Nelson, who was the Storm’s basketball operations manager during Nurse’s second stint, told The Oklahoman’s Jenni Carlson. “Nick was the guy that caught the jacket, said ‘Coach, calm down, calm down.’ He was pretty laid back and pretty quiet.”
In the NBA, Gates has held assistant positions with Sacramento, New Orleans, Minnesota, and Phoenix.
NBA
As he detailed in a 2018 National Basketball Coaches Association feature, Gates grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and then walked on to the basketball team at Boise State. (Coby Karl, the head coach of the defending G League champion Delaware Blue Coats, is also a Boise State graduate and played for Gates on the Idaho Stampede.)
Gates has been pleased with his post-college decision to start quite low in the professional basketball coaching ranks.
“My choices were, I could be an intern assistant coach with a CBA team, and basically, I think it paid $1,000 a month," Gates told Ken Berger for a 2014 CBS Sports story, “or take a full-time job at Micron Technology at $55,000 coming out of college. I remember calling my dad and telling him I was going to do the basketball thing and he hung up on me."
Brase also has a history with Nurse through minor league basketball. He was an assistant on Nurse’s 2012-13 Rio Grande Valley Vipers team that won the D League championship. Other Sixers connections from that squad include Doug West (assistant coach), Toure’ Murry (then a player, now a player development associate coach), and Patrick Beverley (three D League appearances that season).
Brase later ascended to RGV’s head coach and became a Rockets assistant under Mike D’Antoni. While in that role, Brase worked with current Sixers James Harden, Danuel House Jr., and PJ Tucker.
His grandfather is Lute Olson, the late Hall of Fame coach. The 6-foot-6 Brase played for Olson at Arizona.