Who Will Teach All These Rookie Philadelphia 76ers?

2016 Season is very important for the Philadelphia 76ers. But an annual swap of so many players has the record skipping back to development. Who will teach the next wave of rookies?

It’s beginning. The NBA draft is rapidly approaching and with it comes the realization of another significant change to the Philadelphia lineup, and roster, next season. While “who will be gone” is a topic for another day, the team is preparing to welcome Joel Embiid, Dario Saric, and as many as four new faces from the 2016 draft class. All carrying the energy of youth, all basking in the light of dreams of playing basketball in the NBA, but all with an experience tank at zero. Nada. Nothing.

As we discovered in the efforts to remake the 2015-2016 Philadelphia 76ers roster into the epicenter of youth and player development, there is a critical ratio of veteran to rookie ratio which the Sixer’s president and general manager Sam Hinkie seemed to ignore. It showed up with Jahlil Okafor’s off-court antics. It showed up with a handful of point guards but no true starter. It showed up in the horrific attempt by former guard Tony Wroten to find his niche with a team that had started without him. It showed up in high turnover rates, poor shot selections, and even in the struggle to develop a harmonious and simultaneous fit of both Jahlil Okafor and Nerlens Noel on the court simultaneously.

There is only so much Brett Brown to go around. This season proves that beyond a shadow of the doubt.

To compensate for so many young and needy new players, the team had to change the way they structured the team. Assistant coach Mike D’Antoni joined the ranks of the team to help coach Brown in the planning for games and in running the offensive side of practices. The team also signed temporarily retired power forward Elton Brand to help “coach up” the front court, and traded for veteran point guard Ish Smith to help “coach up” the back court. The team then leaned heavily on veteran power forward Carl Landry to work with rookie power forward Richaun Holmes and has been paired with power forward Jerami Grant as of late.

Patches. These personnel moves simply filled the holes that had sprung leaks in the dyke. This was not a fundamental part of the process as it was a reaction to an unforeseen shortcoming. With huge talent comes a significant void to be filled by great coaching, great effort, and great patience. The team’s future is on the upside. With those four new faces from the NBA draft, accompanied by virtual NBA rookies Embiid and Saric, this team will have another wave of new and inexperienced high maintenance rookies on the roster. Potentially 40% of next year’s roster will have played no NBA whatsoever.

But the only challenge I have with this scenario? Who will train them?

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Brett Brown has been shouldering the weight of three consecutive years of a losing basketball program. While the overall goal of achieving a championship team almost demands this route, there is the reality of where the weight of that falls. The head coach. When a roster fills up with so many undrafted, second round, and under 25 aged players, there is the reality of where the weight of training and developing those young men falls. The head coach. For all the basketball analytics, the nutrition, sleep monitoring, sports medicine and science, the burden of wrapping all of these components into a singularly focused great instincts and talented basketball team falls to just one man. The head coach.

Right now, our coach has been running a three year marathon. And instead of a light at the end of a tunnel, the plan appears to be wash, rinse, and repeat. I don’t think it should work that way, particularly heading into the season with so much riding on showing material improvement.

To complicate next season further, the wave of public sentiment is moving towards the “trade Okafor to the Boston Celtics for their Brooklyn Nets first round pick”. That would remove another returning player from the roster and swap in another rookie from the NBA draft. That could translate into seven new rookie faces, or nearly half the team. The downside? Are the Philadelphia 76ers or even the majority of fans prepared to begin at the starting block on year four? A team whose roster is nearly 50% rookies will, by all reasonable account, take three or four years to truly reach their full potential. Is this team prepared to take a step back once more in the hope of taking two steps forward?

Perhaps the team has reached their “maximum capacity” of youth and development, and to move forward, needs to lean towards three year veterans who can join the team without resetting the entire calendar. That would explain why the team was so eager to bring on three year veteran point guard Dennis Schroder at the trade deadeline, and offered a bundle in the process that was eventually turned down by the Atlanta Hawks. It could also explain why the team, already realizing the log jam arriving in the 2016-2017 season at the center position, rejected a reported offer by the Boston Celtics to trade center Jahlil Okafor for the Brooklyn Nets first round pick. There is no more room to train numerous rookies next season.

And so, I don’t see much relevance to the trade scenario exercises going forward that result in Philadelphia 76ers players for NBA draft picks. It’s just not realistic in the current setting. I touched base with the limits to the Philadelphia draft this year with a belief that the tie-breaker in potential prospects should be age. While the rule of thumb is sooner to NBA coaching, faster development holds true for most teams with one or two rookies trying to earn playing time, With the Philadelphia 76ers earnest for young and sometimes undiscovered talent, training rookies by the six-pack seems more of the norm. The team had to redirect roster signings in mid-season by underestimating the sheer magnitude of the effort required to train inexperienced players. Next season, I cannot believe the plan truly hinges upon setting up six or seven more new players and having any belief of success by the team next season.

But per Jerry Colangelo, next season will be better, and within three years, this team will be winning playoff games. All virtual GMing aside, to have any hopes of achieving that, this team has got to switch from “Discard and draw from the draft” to make a true commitment to developing the talent on this team now. It required four separate transactions to augment the current team to handle the youth this year. I cannot see the team electing to redo the process, no matter how many draft picks we have going into draft night.

Next: 2017 Trade Deadline Looms Larger for Philadelphia 76er Jahlil Okafor

I expect the Philadelphia 76ers to be very active in a very unfamiliar area: free agency. Not only will this bolster the team’s production by reinforcing the necessary skill-sets at positions which have remained underdeveloped, but the presence of even a three or four year NBA veteran greatly reduces the load on the current coaching staff. Veterans have shown up for the Sixers this year at a moment’s notice and with relatively sporadic and low overall playing time. Veteran Carl Landry is eighth on the team in scoring with 8.9 points per game, but eleventh on the team in minutes played with just 14.8 minutes per game. Elton Brand is next to last on the team in playing time, with just 10.6 minutes per game, but he is fifth from the bottom in points scored with 4.0 points per game. Veterans bring consistency and an even-natured approach to the game which is very important to the up and down cycle of a young roster. Exhibiting time and time again how positioning, spacing, and shot selection makes a huge overall difference in a game is necessary to bring young and highly skilled players into the comfort zone – a place where they realize the game does not rest solely upon their shoulders.

The path ahead of the Philadelphia 76ers, especially the path through the draft and the off-season, if full of rewards and pitfalls for the team. We simply cannot draft a bevy of players, slap a jersey on them, cut anyone from the team not named Embiid from the roster, and expect to win. This is and will be a very young NBA roster. Before we get out the wheel chairs for these players, let’s teach them to walk and then to run in the NBA. To teach them the right way, we’ll need to get more voices in the locker room who have seen it before. Who will train all these rookies? That’s this year’s next step in the process.