With great youth, comes great mentoring
After the team learned about the dangers of youthful players when Jahlil Okafor experienced some bad judgement off-court, the team became much more proactive. While Okafor was apologizing for his lapse of judgement, the team had already reached out to venerable NBA expert Jerry Colangelo to come onboard as the Chairman of Basketball Operations. With the arrival of Colangelo, the executive acted quickly to reinforce the overstretched head coach Brett Brown. Shortly thereafter, the team announced the hiring of associate head coach Mike D’Antoni. Now with a pair of coaches, the team acted to build support for their youngest and possibly most important player by signing Elton Brand to play alongside and mentor the young Duke center.
The lessons of this season have been many and painfully precious.
None have born the burden of the three year rebuild as much as head coach Brett Brown, who shared the scope and weight of so much development for so many players.
"I do feel the enormity of it from time to time. I wouldn’t be telling you the truth if I said that I had thought in Year 3, this was the group I’d be coaching. I didn’t realize the roster would play out like it has — that last year would be almost a redshirt year, with Joel Embiid and Dario [Saric]. You only know what you know. I speak freely with my guys. I think they speak freely with me. But I’m sure like any coach or parent of 19-year-olds, stuff goes on that they don’t share with me. I’d be naive to think otherwise.” – head coach Brett Brown as interviewed by ESPN.com’s Zach Lowe"
As much as Brown has been overtaxed with developing so many young players into NBA class contributors, no task has been more consuming than his effort to developing a symbiosis between center/power forward Jahlil Okafor and center/power forward Nerlens Noel.
"“I did a lot of studying over the summer revisiting those (San Antonio) Spur days with (Tim) Duncan and (David) Robinson. We’ve studied a lot of people and different teams lately like Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph. There are teams recently that played big ball. I still think it’s going to be a tremendous challenge. Nobody’s saying that we’re convinced that it’s going to be pretty right from the start. There will be times that you’re going to see Nerlens go straight back to that five spot when Jah goes off the floor. It (substituting Noel and Okafor) is a little bit a juggling act on how you’re going to sub it. I think that minutes played for Jahlil — he’s going to have to play 30-plus minutes. Nerlens is going to have to play 30-plus minutes. So, there’s going to be a portion of Jahlil’s minutes that make that five spot available. There are minutes to be had at the five spot. We all know that Nerlens is very capable at the rim blocking shots.”"
But the grand experiment of playing Jahlil Okafor at the center position and Nerlens Noel at the power forward position reversed polarity in mid season, where a curious comment by executive Colangelo appeared to precipitate the change of direction for both players. It was this event that has amplified the ambiguity of which, if either, current big man remains on the team to join the arrival of center/power forward Joel Embiid.
In any event, the struggles to adapt the glut of big men into on-court advantage in the Sixers favor has been linked, understandably, to the limits of Brown’s one-man-does-it-all role. With a roster that began the season with a handful of players trying out for the role of point guard, Brown has been given a roster of parts, and has been forced to construct the lineup on the fly practically each and every game out of players handed over to him by president and general manager Sam Hinkie.
Next: Counter Inexperience = Upper Classmen