The Sixers need more than Nick Nurse to win a championship. They need better work from Daryl Morey.
This roster hasn't shown it's capable of playing quality basketball throughout the playoffs. Morey has to build one. That factor, more than any head coaching hire, will chart the team's future.
Back in March 2019, roughly three months before Nick Nurse and the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship, roughly four years before the 76ers hired Nurse to be their head coach, there was a panel discussion in Boston.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I love a good panel discussion, especially when the panelists are people who are otherwise reluctant to speak publicly and frankly about what they do and how they do it. Something happens when they get on that stage and in those chairs. Maybe they get comfortable in front of a smart and friendly audience. Maybe they get a little high on the air of expertise that being on a panel gives them, even if, in reality, they have no idea what they’re doing. Whatever the reason, they tend to open up. It’s like someone has injected them with sodium pentothal.
This panel discussion was at the MIT Sloan Analytics Sports Conference — founded by a fellow named Daryl Morey — and it included Bob Myers, who earlier this week stepped down after 11 years as the Golden State Warriors’ general manager, and Hall of Fame player Paul Pierce.
Myers and the Warriors had won three championships in the previous four seasons. Pierce had won one in 2008 with the Boston Celtics, with Doc Rivers as his head coach. They were discussing the difference between regular-season basketball and postseason basketball, and their discussion then is relevant to what is supposed to be Nurse’s mission now: winning the Sixers an NBA title of their own.
Here’s something Myers said that day. It’s lengthy, but it’s worthwhile, and it gets to the heart of just how much of an influence Nurse might have on the Sixers’ championship chances. Bear with it.
“The playoffs are nothing like the regular season,” he said. “They are two completely different sports. [Pierce is] playing 42 minutes in the playoffs — I don’t know what he averaged in the regular season — so your bench is completely different in the regular season versus the playoffs. You do prepare differently.
“You’d better believe Paul, listening to Doc as his coach in a regular-season back-to-back game, he’s going into the locker room, ‘All right, who have I got?’ In the playoffs, he knows exactly what he’s doing. And by the way, in the playoffs, his first move is gone. It’s like a baseball player with a scouting report: ‘OK, he cannot hit a curveball away.’ He’s getting a curveball away every single pitch. … Whatever they know he does well is gone.
“That’s where you need to check every box, even shooters. We’ve played some great shooters in the playoffs and neutralized them, because if all you can do is shoot the three, you’re not necessarily the weapon we sometimes make you out to be in the regular season. That two feet of space you have in the regular season is two inches, and you watch how players cannot make a shot in the playoffs and shoot 42% in the regular season. It’s not the same thing. … You watch the playoffs, and you’ll know who can play basketball. That’s when you evaluate players.”
By that standard, the Sixers have a long way yet to go, even if James Harden, who seems to have left his heart in Houston, returns. Take this year’s postseason. Of the team’s top four scorers — Joel Embiid, Harden, Tyrese Maxey, and Tobias Harris — just one averaged more points and shot a better percentage from the field in the postseason than he did the regular season. That one player was Harris.
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And that’s just one example of a trend that stretches over the last six years. Hell, the Sixers, for a brief time, had the walking, trash-talking representation of Myers’ assertion, and they decided that they couldn’t and shouldn’t keep Jimmy Butler around.
Nurse said Thursday that he doesn’t “vibrate on the frequency of the past.” (Who’s going to be his top assistant, Beck or Bob Weir?) But the Sixers’ recent playoff history is so full of disappointment and underachievement that no one who’s being honest can simply erase it from memory or hope that a new head coach can unlock something in players that has rarely, if ever, been unlocked before. Nurse is an excellent coach, arguably the best choice available to the Sixers to replace Rivers. OK … then what? In the aftermath of Games 6 and 7 against the Celtics, is anyone saying, This is a roster that has what it takes to win a championship?
“We’re going to hit that head on,” Nurse said. “We’re judged on how we play in the playoffs. We’re going to have to face it, and we’re going to have to rise above it.”
If they’re going to do that any time in the near future, it’s going to take more than Nick Nurse. It’s going to take more than a new coach. It’s going to take more and better work by the man who was sitting to Nurse’s left during that news conference Thursday afternoon. The man who gave Bob Myers the panel and platform three years ago to account for the shortcomings of this basketball team in the present. That man, of course, is Daryl Morey.