Can Doc Rivers help the Philadelphia 76ers take the next step after a failed 2019-20 campaign?
Two days after mutually agreeing to leave his role as head coach of the LA Clippers, Rivers found a new challenge, agreeing to take the same job with the Sixers. Rivers goes from a team with talent and chemistry issues to a more extreme version in Philadelphia, where a season that began with championship expectations ended in a first-round sweep.
The core talent many thought made the 76ers title contenders is still in place. Can Rivers put the pieces together correctly to help Philadelphia get back to the conference finals for the first time since 2001? Let's take a look at how he might do that.
Get Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons on the same page
The first task for Rivers as head coach probably has nothing to do with X's and O's. Instead, it's imperative he makes sure his two new stars are ready to work together. Rivers has plenty of experience dealing with star players who aren't exactly best of friends; Blake Griffin and Chris Paul made it work together for six seasons with the Clippers, the last four with Rivers as head coach.
As compared to Griffin and Paul, natural pick-and-roll partners, the on-court fit between Embiid and Simmons is less elegant. In an ideal world, both would be surrounded by shooters who could provide them maximum space to operate one-on-one or in the pick-and-roll game.
Still, the idea that Embiid and Simmons can't work together is plainly false. In 2017-18, Simmons' rookie season, Philly outscored opponents by 15.5 points per 100 possessions with both on the court. As the roster around them has changed, that figure dwindled to a plus-7.6 net rating in 2018-19 and plus-0.6 this season. And that's where lineup decisions start to loom large.
Figure out where Simmons fits
The biggest disappointment of the patella subluxation Simmons suffered in the Sixers' second seeding game, above and beyond his absence during the team's first-round sweep, was that we never got a real look at how he would perform at power forward. Ahead of the restart of the 2019-20 season, former Philadelphia coach Brett Brown moved Simmons from point guard -- where he'd started throughout his first two-plus seasons -- to the frontcourt, aiming to get him the ball closer to the basket.
In Griffin, there's a template for how Rivers can use Simmons as a point forward. Specifically, we can look at how Griffin played without Paul at the point. During both 2015-16 and 2016-17, Griffin averaged 6.4 assists per 36 minutes with Paul on the bench according to NBA Advanced Stats data -- not quite as impressive as Simmons' 8.1 assists per 36 minutes in each of the past two seasons, but it's in the same ballpark.
Even with Paul on the bench, Griffin rarely ran pick-and-rolls as the ball handler, but Rivers liked to play through him at the elbow. Griffin ranked in the top five in elbow touches per game every season from Rivers' arrival in 2013-14 through Paul's departure, per NBA Advanced Stats, peaking at 10.5 per game in 2014-15 (second). By contrast, Simmons averaged just 2.9 elbow touches per game last year.
Though Griffin was more of a perimeter threat than Simmons is, it wasn't until his final half-season with the Clippers after Paul's departure that he averaged more than 0.6 3-pointers per game. And he played next to a complete non-shooter in DeAndre Jordan. So Rivers has a track record of making it work with two frontcourt players most comfortable close to the basket.
Deploy the other pieces correctly
Thus far, I've been analyzing Philadelphia with Simmons and Embiid together in the frontcourt. That creates a $96.5 million question: What happens to Al Horford, who has that much guaranteed money remaining on the contract he signed last summer?
For now, Horford projects as a backup center. If Rivers carries over Brown's tendency to stagger the minutes of his two stars as much as possible -- meaning they play separately more than together -- there should be enough room for Horford to play starter-level minutes as a reserve.
Sorting through the perimeter talent will be another challenge for Rivers. Josh Richardson, the team's best 3-and-D contributor, is a given. So too is Tobias Harris, who played the best basketball of his career during the year he spent under Rivers with the Clippers. The last spot, and minutes off the bench, figure to be up for grabs.
Guard Shake Milton started all eight seeding games and all four playoff games, but he might have to prove himself again with a new coach. The 76ers also have Matisse Thybulle, a promising wing defender and improving shooter, as well as shooting specialist Furkan Korkmaz.
One danger of bringing in Rivers is he might be inclined to favor proven veterans with limited upside over the team's young talent on the perimeter. That could mean Alec Burks and Glenn Robinson III, should they return as free agents, or other veterans Philly adds in free agency. To his credit, Rivers was better in that regard at the end of his Clippers tenure, leaning heavily on rookies Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Landry Shamet during the team's 2019 postseason run and sticking with Shamet in this year's playoffs.
Instill confidence
It's worth remembering that back when Rivers last changed teams, in the summer of 2013, much of the speculation centered on whether future Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett might follow him from Boston to L.A., presumably in a trade sending Jordan to the Celtics. The NBA took that option off the table after Rivers was traded to the Clippers in exchange for a 2015 first-round pick. (Player transactions are prohibited between teams that trade coaches or executives so as to prevent side deals providing compensation for them besides draft picks.)
Rivers responded by talking up Jordan's defensive prowess, hyping him as a Defensive Player of the Year contender and -- to some extent -- speaking that improvement into existence. The task in Philadelphia isn't exactly the same, but Rivers' gregarious personality can take some of the pressure off Embiid and Simmons in a market known for its perpetual sense of dread.
It's easy to forget how quickly our perceptions of teams can turn. Over the past three seasons, Rivers' former Boston team went from rising force in the East when they advanced within a game of the 2018 NBA Finals to the brink of collapse when they lost badly in the 2019 second round and star point guard Kyrie Irving and Horford left via free agency to on the rise again this season thanks to Jayson Tatum's development.
Though I never quite bought into the Sixers hype last summer, there's no question Philadelphia has the talent to contend in the East. We're still less than a year and a half removed from the Sixers coming within Kawhi Leonard's miracle 3-pointer of playing overtime to advance to the Eastern Conference finals. Rivers looks like the right pick to try to get Philly back on track.