Potential Philadelphia 76ers Assistant Coach Candidates

Sam Mitchell’s interview

Mitchell is freshly released from the interim role with the Minnesota Timberwolves, a young team with some major attributes whose pieces are very similar to those of the Philadelphia 76ers this season.

Just see what he says about assistant coaching in this interview with the Minnesota Post’s Britt Robinson and you see that he is a talented coach with pretty good ideas of the way to succeed:

"MP: How much of your independent stuff could you put in before the season started? SM: So when that (the date of the head coach’s return) is in your mind, the tough thing is, you start off on the basis of defense because that was just the easiest thing to do. You are stuck by what you implement. When you are an assistant coach — at least my approach to being an assistant coach — I don’t walk in with an agenda. That ain’t my job. My job is to walk in with an open mind and open ears and when coach says, “OK, this is what I want to do defensively, this is what I want to do offensively,” look at those things he wants to do and help him tweak it to fit our team. You don’t come in and do it with your own plays and your own defensive principles. You don’t even think about that. And so when I came in, all I was thinking about was, “OK, since we were so bad defensively last year, let’s just focus on the things we can try to change immediately.” So we put whole-heartedly into the defense. We were trying to get that better because coach (the late Flip Saunders) runs a lot of stuff [on offense] that he likes to run. I ran some of his stuff, a couple of his sets in Toronto, but I ran a more wide-open game as far as pick and roll, because I had shooters. You know, I had Bargnani, Kapono, Parker, Bosh, Calderon — I had shooters. Matt Barnes. What’s the guy from UConn who could shoot? Donyell Marshall. So I had shooters, bigs and littles. So we opened a lot of the game up with pick-and-rolls and pass-and-cut and shot a lot of threes. But you know coach runs a lot of sets. MP: Plus there is less of a variation on how coaches coach defense than offense, isn’t there? SM: No, everybody has different principles. Everybody has a different way of doing things. We did things in Toronto based on our size and lack of athleticism. We trapped and made people keep the ball. Our whole thing was we didn’t let you put us in rotation — we didn’t want to be chasing that ball. Because against good teams, you can’t outrun the basketball. The toughest thing for me this year is that with our personnel, because we’re young and we don’t have shooters — or these guys haven’t developed into good shooters yet — is what can we run? I am constantly tweaking our offense, trying to figure out what can we do to get more scoring. The toughest thing is that our best defensive team is not very good at scoring. But our guys that can score a little bit better — but are not world-beaters at scoring — they make a lot of mistakes defensively. So if you look at the games that we’ve won and games where we’ve been close, it has been our defense that has done it. So when you look at it, what is going to give you a better chance to win? Obviously we need to get better offensively and try to open things up and get a little more flow and try to get some easy baskets. But at the end of the day, our inability, our not being able to shoot three-ball, is really tough because everybody just packs the paint. Everybody just sits on the elbows and the boxes and they take away our penetration. And they make us shoot jump shots. Which is tough on us. That’s why our guys, we have to understand that we’ve got to be able to get out in transition and get some easy baskets. But the tough thing is — some teams like Sacramento, they leak guys out. But they’ve got DeMarcus Cousins down there, getting all the rebounds. When we start trying to leak guys out, then we don’t rebound."

The past experiences would be a nice blend to the skill-sets of head coach Brett Brown.  If Brown is truly “the man”, Mitchell would be wonderful extension of Brown’s leadership – taking the burden of mentoring and developing players and plays and allowing Brown to step into the game management side more effectively.

Next: Jeff Van Gundy