GALLOWAY, N.J. — The point guard position is sure to be a recurring topic of the 2015-16 NBA season for the Sixers. Coach Brett Brown has seemingly prepared himself for the questions and the status updates to come only a handful of days into the preseason.
So even when the competition for three roster spots amongst the six point guards on the roster hasn’t even begun, Brown gave a status update.
“It’s the greatest mystery on our team right now,” Brown said. “We have a bunch of guys in the gym and it’s going to come from that. It’s a key position for sure, but it’s a mystery.”
It’s a mystery mostly because of who hasn’t been able to engage in the competition. Veterans Kendall Marshall and Tony Wroten won’t be able to practice until the end of the month as they recover from ACL surgery and Pierre Jackson has been limited in practice because of a groin injury that bothered him during the summer.
Jackson is returning from a ruptured Achilles that kept him out of the 2014-15 season.
That has left Brown with point guards Isaiah Canaan, T.J. McConnell and Scottie Wilbekin to work with in the practice sessions at Stockton University and likely for Tuesday’s exhibition game in Washington against the Wizards.
So with training camp coming to an end, the point guard competition has not been the “fistfight” Brown had predicted. Instead, it’s status quo.
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“It’s too early to tell,” Brown said. “I like what I see at the moment, but everything gets filtered in an NBA game and you see it for what it is. These guys have an A-plus attitude and give an A-plus effort and they’re young and I see upside in all of them. That’s why they’re in our gym.
“They’ve all been solid. No one has really jumped out ahead of the pack. I think I can make a more accurate assessment after we play some preseason games.”
While in the gym, though, Brown has been limited in what he has been able to work on with his barebones offense. During his first two seasons as coach, Brown slowly infused the offense with pages from the playbook, focusing mostly on transition and pace.
However, with Jahlil Okafor added to the mix with big man Nerlens Noel, Brown wants the ball in the low post in the half-court offense. Certainly the Sixers are going to focus on keeping an uptempo pace, but Okafor is going to have his hands on the ball a lot.
That makes the point guard especially important in the Sixers’ offense. Someone has to push the pace and get the ball down low to Okafor. So rather than continue to add pages to the playbook, Brown is keeping things as simple as possible with his offense.
“We start out as completely vanilla as vanilla can be,” Brown said. “It’s very simple and deliberate and we try to focus on the teaching part.”
But with a young team, Brown is keeping it vanilla throughout. With 19 of the 20 players coming into camp with three years of NBA experience or less — and just one player on the roster born in the 1980s — the players are learning about life on their own and life in the NBA, too.
“It’s all vanilla, but that’s the stage that this program is at right now,” Brown said. “But it’s vanilla off the court, too.”
So the point guard battle that was expected has not come to pass … yet.
“Someone will emerge. It’s still the early stage of making assessments. It will reveal itself soon,” Brown said.