Giving Thanks for Brett Brown

Philadelphia 76ers‘ head coach Brett Brown certainly won’t win Coach of the Year, but he does deserve some thanks for everything he does with the team.

As the NBA regular season winds down, and the playoffs begin to heat up, the awards season is right around the corner. Soon we will know who is the Most Valuable Player, the Rookie of the Year, the Defensive Player of the Year, and even the Coach of the Year.

With all of those awards, we typically have a list of 2-3 players that should be competing for the award, but Coach of the Year is a bit more unknown as far as which candidates will be in the running. There’s plenty of really solid options around the league, and it’s always tough to distinguish who is a quality coach, and who is simply riding out the talent of the players he has been given.

Most Philadelphia 76ers fans recognize that their coach, Brett Brown, is an intelligent, high quality coach, but also realize that he has nearly no shot at winning Coach of the Year. There is almost no doubt about Brown’s skills from anyone in the league as a motivator and developmental mind, but the sheer win-loss record unfortunately disqualifies him from the running in the minds of most.

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That’s not fair, because there is more to being a coach than simply winning games, especially with this team. Even in several losses this season, there were positives to be taken away, and reasons to believe that “moral victories” were real, even in the NBA.

Brown won’t win Coach of the Year. He knows that, we know that, and everyone in the league knows it. Whether or not that’s justified that he won’t even be considered for it is up for debate, but there is something we can do to make up for him not winning the award — we can stop taking him for granted.

Unfortunately with Brown, I think this happens every year. Fans look at where the team is at and if they like where they’re at, it’s chalked up to the players being successful, and really focusing on improving their craft. If the team is doing bad, it’s often chalked up to things the coaching staff is doing wrong. This is true for almost any team, and it’s not clear why.

Perhaps it’s simply because these players are professional, and it seems absurd to us that these professionals would be the reason for a fallout. We often look for issues higher up rather than what’s in front of us.

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Brown will likely not catch a whole lot of criticism as this year ends because his team really did more than was expected of them. They’re nearing 30 wins, which is triple what they did last year, they were able to keep up with some really good NBA teams and win games even without players like Joel Embiid. They overcame struggles of play calling and late-game jitters, of not being able to set up effective late game plays, and really just overall being in games for an entire 48 minutes.

To pretend Brown wasn’t instrumental in not only building this team to be something at the end of this season that they weren’t at the beginning, but also working with players over the last several years, would be foolish. We should be thankful for Brown and his efforts, and realize that he is one of the most important pieces of this whole process, perhaps more important than any single player.

His care for his players, their success, and his drive to make them reach their top possible potential, really is effective,

In a conversation with the Bucks County Courier Times’ Tom Moore, Brett’s father, Bob Brown (a coach himself) detailed how Brett’s attitude was as a player in high school, and it seems similar to how he operates now.

"“He gets mad and goes to bed. He gets up the next morning and boom, he’s going ahead. It’s always positive. How he does it — I couldn’t do it. And that’s probably the thing that impresses me the most about what the last four years have been.”"

Brown is one of the most visually tempered people when it comes to coaching his teams. It’s astonishing that he doesn’t get many technical fouls. The next day, however, he’s always back at practice or shootaround with a refreshed attitude and a smile on his face.

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That’s the ideal coach. A coach that gets into it, gets his attitude going during games, and demands the most out of his players in the 48 minutes, while being able to maintain a positive attitude the next day, no matter the outcome of the game before. Especially for a rebuilding team, Brown was, and is perfect. We should be thankful the Sixers have a coach like him to lead the next several years.