DOC RIVERS HAD been officially unemployed for what seemed like 13 seconds when Daryl Morey hit up his cell.
"Come work for us!" implored the Houston Rockets' general manager.
Even though he'd seen it coming for weeks, Rivers was thoroughly wrecked by his departure from the LA Clippers and begged off. "I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet," he told Morey. "I might take a year off."
Rivers was wrung out. He'd been coaching for 21 straight seasons, his only hiatus the few months in between his dismissal from the Orlando Magic in November 2003 and his acceptance to become the Boston Celtics' coach the following April. His closest confidants urged him to step back, lounge on his deck, track sunsets and languidly engage in endless rounds of golf. Maybe even assess some strategies for actually sleeping through the night. Did Rivers need all that stress?
He did. Rivers' fantasy of kicking back was just that -- a fairy tale instantly quashed once the Philadelphia 76ers contacted him. The temptation to mold big man Joel Embiid and big point guard Ben Simmons was too delicious to pass up.
"Work for us!" Morey implored again from Houston when reports surfaced of the Sixers' pursuit of the former Clippers coach. Rivers, though, had made up his mind.
"Hey," Rivers said offhandedly just before they hung up, "why don't you come work for us?"
Thirty days later, Morey did. Their union represents a new, desperately needed chapter for a decorated coach who blew a 3-1 series lead and was undone by a glaring lack of the very hallmark -- communication -- that he'd built his reputation on. It's a reset for an innovative front-office guru who once was synonymous with analytics but will now be forever framed as the man who triggered an international incident by tweeting seven succinct words that cost the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars.
Their charge is to steer the two Sixers linchpins toward their own fresh start after being unceremoniously swept by the Celtics in the first round of the 2020 playoffs. For Embiid, that means reestablishing himself as the dominant post player in an era that blanches at that very notion. For Simmons, who missed 25 games last season, it means finding a way to fine-tune his body so he can maximize his influence over the game and stay on the floor. And, most important, it means melding the two young stars so they can finally coexist at a championship level to dispel persistent reports of interest in disgruntled Houston star (and Morey favorite) James Harden. That noise will not subside anytime soon.
The misery of losing has bound them together. Yet as Rivers, Morey, Embiid and Simmons arrived at such a hollow place, the reasons as to why their basketball lifelines frayed to the breaking point varied.
"I'm not gonna lie," Embiid says. "Last year was very, very difficult."
"Kind of a lost season," Simmons says. "It just never felt like we were together as a team."
On Dec. 2, Rivers huddled with Embiid and Simmons in his office. He embarked on an emotional pitch as to why he fervently believes the two of them can succeed together, but he also made one thing abundantly clear: Time is running out for them to prove it.
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PACING THE DELIVERY room, Embiid clutched girlfriend Anne de Paula's hand and encouraged her to breathe through the pain. Their first child, a boy named Arthur after Joel's late younger brother, was about to be born when Embiid's phone started dinging, one text after another.
In between contractions, he glanced at the messages. The All-NBA team had just been released. Embiid wasn't on it.
"I kind of knew it would go that way," Embiid says. "We didn't have a good year, and I think there's some recency bias. People forget about you."
Perusing the list further, Embiid saw that Simmons was on there, a third-team selection for the first time in his young career. Embiid understood there was room for both of them only if they won meaningful games. Later, he would take careful note of the criticisms from those who left him off; he was inconsistent, his conditioning was suspect, he was moody, he wasn't a leader. Disappointment soon smoldered into indignation.
"I agree that Anthony Davis had a better season than me," Embiid says. "[Nikola] Jokic? That's debatable. But Rudy Gobert? No offense, but he [averaged] 15 [points] and 13 [rebounds] and I had my 23 and 12, and that's kind of a big difference. I think my numbers were better. But people didn't want to vote for me because our team didn't do well.
"That's OK, because I will use it to motivate me so there is no chance that anyone can make that mistake again."
Embiid is sitting in his Philadelphia home, his infant son snoozing nearby, as snow falls softly outside his window. He is on a joint Zoom call with Simmons -- Doc's idea -- and the two of them are ticking off the reasons that this season, while still in its infancy, already feels different.
"The vibe is so much better," Simmons says. "Everybody wants to come to practice. Everybody shows up early. When I see Joel in there working on his game, it makes me want to work that much harder.
"We didn't have that last year. Everybody was going their own way."
In fact, team sources say, Simmons became so disillusioned with the Sixers staff, he did much of his work outside the facility under the watchful eye of trainer Chris Johnson. That erosion of trust only further contributed to the splintered chemistry on the floor and tension among coaches and players. Outsiders repeatedly suggested Embiid and Simmons could not coexist, particularly within a lineup that provided poor spacing. Their divergent personalities led to speculation they disliked each other, yet, says one former Sixers staffer, it was more a disconnect than anything: "There just wasn't a whole lot of communication."
Morey and Rivers claim they are unconcerned about the relationship between the two players, although the new head coach has suggested they invest a bit more in the concept of shared experiences (hence the joint interview).
"If you stack up all the stars on every team, how many are great friends?" Morey asks.
"Competition creates tension, and it's rare that everyone agrees on how things should go."
Embiid and Simmons dismiss questions about their partnership as a tired refrain.
"I predicted this the day Ben arrived," Embiid says. "I told everyone, 'The media will try to break us apart.' You don't have to do everything together to be good teammates."
"I don't really want to hang around Jo all the time," chimes in Simmons, grinning.
STILL BRUISED FROM the Clippers' implosion, Rivers pledged transparency in his meeting with Embiid and Simmons and asked for the same in return. He instructed them to present a united front at all times. He told Embiid he needed to be in better shape. He scolded Simmons for not going to the free throw line more and challenged the point guard to study film and learn the tendencies of the opposition, not just his own teammates.
"I appreciate how honest he is with me," Simmons says. "The other night, he called me over in the middle of the game and said, 'Are you going to the f---ing rim or what?' I like that."
In his message to the rest of the roster, Rivers made it clear that NBA teams do not operate as a democracy. Some players are treated differently from others, and everyone better get used to it.
"Every player says, 'I want to win a championship,'" Rivers says. "That's bull. A lot of them want to win as long as they get to do exactly what they want to do."
He has taken a hard look at what went wrong in Los Angeles and acknowledges his role in the undoing of a roster dripping with equal parts talent and dysfunction. In the weeks after Rivers took the Sixers job, Paul George publicly questioned how the coach utilized him on the floor, and reports surfaced of extraordinary allowances made for Kawhi Leonard that infuriated teammates and compromised chemistry.
"A lot of it is true," Rivers concedes. "There was special treatment, but what people don't understand is I was the guy who didn't like it and was fighting it."
While Rivers knew that allowances for Leonard might be problematic, he says he underestimated how disjointed his locker room had become and how little his voice resonated with the veterans he thought he had developed strong relationships with.
"The goal on every team is to find a group of guys who have figured out how to win -- or at least some of them," Rivers says. "If they are the right ones, they don't give a s--- what anyone else does. They don't get caught up in all the crap.
"The Lakers are a great example. Clearly LeBron and AD got different treatment, but the guys around them said, 'Who cares? As long as we win.'"
Processing the public fallout of the Clippers' collapse has been difficult but necessary. Rivers says he's learned a few things about himself that he hopes will benefit the Sixers moving forward -- including the need to listen closely to all the voices in the locker room, not just the most prominent ones.
"Hearing now how much that team didn't get along, that bothers me," Rivers says. "I pride myself on getting guys together. I knew we weren't the most cohesive team, but -- maybe it's my ego -- I thought I could get everyone to still buy in."
IN TRYING TO solve the puzzle of the Sixers' uneven results, Morey went to study film from Simmons' rookie year with the lineup that included Embiid, JJ Redick, Robert Covington and Dario Saric. It was a group that outscored opponents by 20.5 points per 100 possessions, per NBA.com/stats.
"That lineup had everything," says Simmons wistfully. "We could run, and we could get it inside to Jo because we had shooters all around him."
Embiid believes their heartbreaking Game 7 loss to the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 playoffs contributed to personnel changes last season that hamstrung the team's ability to succeed. "Toronto beat us because they went big, and we overreacted to that," Embiid says.
After watching and rewatching that quintet from 2018, Morey decided to replicate that personnel. "Looking back at it, you say, 'What? Why did they change this?'" he says.
He acquired Seth Curry, who shot 45.2% from the 3-point line last season, to assume Redick's spot and veteran Danny Green to fill Covington's role, with the idea of plugging in Tobias Harris in Saric's slot. Moving on from Al Horford solved some of the spacing issues and awkward fit of too many bigs on the floor.
Rivers plans to draw up more pick-and-rolls for Simmons and Embiid, and has implored Harris, who played for him in L.A., to stop over-dribbling and resort back to instinctual basketball. Rivers has informed Simmons that he's expected to attack the rim and get shots early in the shot clock, while promising Embiid that his offense will come out of the post later in the shot clock.
Rivers and Morey agree they must be in lockstep for their message to remain streamlined. Morey lives by the data, a tool that Rivers has resisted in the past, yet the coach claps back at reports that he ignored the Clippers' analytics staff.
"Coaches never used to be that close with the guys on the analytics side, but that's changed," Rivers says. "One of the guys that I got tight with in L.A. was Jud [Winton, vice president of research and analytics]. I had him at all of our coaches meetings, and some of my old-school assistants were complaining, 'What the f--- is Jud doing in here?' But Jud ended up getting some street cred when they started playing pickup [basketball], because he was the best player on the staff besides Sam Cassell. So then it became, 'Man, this nerd actually knows the game. He's pretty good.'"
THERE'S A QUAINT story that Morey and Rivers bonded during their brief time together working for the Celtics in the mid-2000s. But in truth, their interactions there were minimal. Morey was a young hire in charge of special projects who had a limited basketball background at the time. "I knew there was some little curmudgeon down the hall coming up with stats," Rivers says. "My response was, 'What the f--- is all this stuff?'"
Their relationship developed years later when a frustrated Rivers would call Morey begging him to trade for his son Austin, who he felt was being misused in New Orleans. Ironically, Rivers ended up with the trade to pull his son from the Pelicans, but Austin eventually did make his way to Houston. Morey recalls a delightful visit with Doc one night after the Clippers' coach was ejected and Morey watched the rest of the game with the elder Rivers in the visitors locker room. There was another chance meeting a couple of years later, when Morey's son was playing in a volleyball competition in Anaheim and Morey dropped in to scout UC Irvine's basketball team, for which Spencer Rivers, Doc's youngest son, was playing. Doc and Morey sat together, ruminating over everything from headstrong sons to temperamental superstars to demanding "new age" owners.
Morey and Rivers connected again in the bubble in August when Doc dropped in to catch Austin in action. By then, both men sensed that the futures with their respective teams might be tenuous. There was even some lighthearted discussion of working together someday.
Now, for both men to rewrite their own history, they must unlock the greatness of the Sixers' franchise pieces.
"I told Joel he should show up every night and say, 'I'm the baddest guy on the planet,'" Rivers says. "To do that, he needs to be consistent, to be willing to do extra work, to go all out in practice.
"Ben just needs to get out of his head. Don't worry about shooting, just grab the ball, go downhill and don't stop until you are at the rim. Let's put him in a position where he can be an instinctive passer. He can't do that if he's thinking about all the other stuff. Like I told him, Jimmy Butler just dominated the playoffs without shooting a 3."
All parties insist they've learned from their lost seasons. Embiid says he has completely retooled his approach, with new training programs and a chef to manage his calorie intake. Simmons has also made changes, adding massage and stretching regimens to preserve his health.
Rivers, too, has taken new stock of how he does business. While he retained Cassell, his longtime bench lieutenant who has already clicked with Simmons, Doc went outside his usual circle to hire Dan Burke and Dave Joerger, two accomplished assistants who provide new voices and fresh ideas.
The common thread for all is to win -- right now. The undercurrent of urgency is unmistakable, directly tied to events of the recent past, which the coach, the GM and the franchise players understand will haunt them until they collectively craft a new chapter with a more palatable ending.