Can a new coach help the Philadelphia 76ers fulfill the potential their roster was expected to offer entering the season?
After adding Al Horford and Josh Richardson to a core of All-Stars Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons last summer, the Sixers were trendy picks to improve on last year's playoff run -- when they gave the eventual champion Toronto Raptors their toughest test before losing at the buzzer in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Instead, the 76ers were swept out of the playoffs by Boston, and coach Brett Brown lost his job.
With relatively little flexibility to make changes to the roster, the 76ers will hope replacing Brown can produce better results.
Is that realistic? Let's look at how they can make it work.
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Expectations too high for Sixers?
This time last year, our summer forecast had Philadelphia as the third-most likely team to win the NBA title, just ahead of the Los Angeles Lakers. Statistical projections for the 76ers were all over the map. At that point, FiveThirtyEight's projections had Philadelphia with the best championship odds, while my projections using ESPN's real plus-minus put the Sixers just third in the East.
Once the season tipped off, Philadelphia looked like a legitimate title contender at the friendly confines of the Wells Fargo Center, going 29-2 at home before the season was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But there's no reason to believe that the Sixers we saw at home were any more real than the version that went 10-24 in road games, a record slightly worse than that of the lottery-bound New York Knicks (10-23).
In part, the discrepancy was explained by unusually (and unsustainably) large disparities in shooting at home and on the road. At home, Philadelphia shot 4.6 percentage points better on 3-pointers than opponents (37.6% to 33.0%), the league's second-largest differential. On the road, the 76ers shot 2.6 percentage points worse than their opponents (35.0% to 37.6%), putting them 23rd in the league.
Setting aside that statistical quirk, overall Philadelphia was a good team but far from a great one. The pieces didn't work well together, with Horford struggling to fit in alongside Embiid and Simmons. An apparent new start in the bubble proved short-lived, with Simmons suffering a season-ending patella dislocation in the team's third seeding game.
Including seeding games, the Sixers were slightly better than league average at both ends of the court, tilting somewhat toward defense (they ranked eighth there, and 14th in offensive rating). Their plus-2.3 net rating was good for 10th in the league. Ordinarily, we wouldn't be taking a team like this seriously as a championship contender.
How can Philadelphia maximize Embiid and Simmons?
The fundamental question for whomever replaces Brown is how to bring out the strengths of both Embiid and Simmons despite the fact that their skill sets aren't especially complementary. To some extent, that's probably always going to mean playing three different styles: one with both stars on the court, and one for each of them individually.
To his credit, Brown was aggressive about staggering the minutes of Embiid and Simmons. During the 41 games both played this season, they shared the court just 42% of the time, according to analysis of data from NBA Advanced Stats. Meanwhile, both were on the bench for just 7% of the 76ers' minutes, a factor surely inflated by injuries and garbage time.
It's not that Embiid and Simmons can't be successful together. In 2017-18, Simmons' rookie season, Philly outscored opponents by 15.5 points per 100 possessions with both on the court. But the fact that both players are most dangerous closer to the basket -- Embiid in the post, Simmons on the drive -- presents inevitable challenges.
Another question facing the next Sixers coach is where to play Simmons positionally. From day one of his NBA career, Brown made it clear that Simmons was his point guard at 6-foot-10. That changed during practices ahead of the restart, when Brown used Simmons at power forward with Shake Milton at point guard. That experiment ended early with Simmons' injury during the second seeding game, yielding little data.
What else can Philadelphia do?
Ultimately, much of the 76ers' disappointing season can be traced to Horford's poor fit at power forward next to Embiid and with Simmons. When all three players shared the court, Philadelphia was outscored and posted an offensive rating in just the third (of 100) percentile of all qualifying lineups league-wide (minimum 15 possessions), per Cleaning the Glass data. With Horford off the court, the Sixers' offensive rating with both Embiid and Simmons improved all the way to the 89th percentile.
Though Horford-Embiid frontcourts were quite good defensively overall, the Celtics exposed the challenges of asking Horford to defend a smaller, quicker power forward during the playoff series. According to analysis of lineup data from NBA Advanced Stats, Boston posted an unthinkable 129.2 offensive rating with Horford at the 4.
As time goes on, defending power forwards figures to only get more difficult for Horford, who turned 34 in June. If Horford eventually proves strictly a backup to Embiid, that's a poor investment of the $69 million he's guaranteed over the next three seasons. (That total increases to $74 million if Philly reaches the NBA Finals by 2022 and to $81 million if they win a title, a possibility that looks less likely than when the contract was signed.)
Signing Horford last summer used the 76ers' last cap space for the foreseeable future. With a max extension for Simmons kicking in, Philadelphia has nearly $150 million in salary committed for 2020-21, which would put the Sixers well north of the luxury-tax line if it remains at this season's level ($132.6 million).
If Philly is going to dramatically alter the roster this offseason, then trades are the only realistic option. That could force the 76ers to dip deeper into their store of first-round picks. Already, Philadelphia has gone from having five extra first-round picks at the time Sam Hinkie resigned his role as general manager and president of basketball operations (in April 2016) to having no extra picks going forward. (The 76ers will get the Oklahoma City Thunder's first-round pick this year, originally acquired by Hinkie, but owe their own pick to the Brooklyn Nets via the LA Clippers.)
New coach best hope for Philadelphia
Viewed from this perspective, the Sixers' decision to fire Brown looks like a classic NBA trope: Can't change all the players, so might as well try changing the coach. Even though I don't think Brown was remotely near Philly's biggest problem, that decision might pay off. We've seen seemingly weaker rosters transformed into contenders by a visionary coach.
In particular, I'm curious to see what the 76ers might look like playing more pick-and-roll basketball. Dating back to the Process days, Brown has preferred using other actions to the pick-and-roll. Only the Golden State Warriors set fewer ball screens in the past seven years than Philadelphia.
Brown's replacement might be more aggressive about putting Embiid and Simmons in the pick-and-roll together. Remarkably, over their three seasons, they've run just 306 ball screens, according to Second Spectrum tracking, or about as many as the Utah Jazz ran in the time it took you to read this sentence. That total puts Simmons and Embiid outside the NBA's top 200 ball-screen combos in that span.
Additionally, a new voice might break through and convince Simmons to start shooting 3-pointers. He has dipped his toe in the water toward attempting 3s in spot-up situations a few times but has remained hesitant to dive in. Even if Simmons is not particularly accurate, the willingness to shoot 3s could still give him more gravity playing off the ball.
It's also possible the 76ers' problems are primarily about their roster construction, and changing coaches won't overcome that. If a new coach isn't the answer, Philadelphia's choices will become far more difficult.
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