Doc Rivers driven by underdog attitude as he enters what could be final Sixers postseason

Doc Rivers is a charming, tough, and confident underdog.

The 76ers coach is a godsend for visiting media looking to get sound bites about his former players and opposing teams. Yet he can become abrasive toward local media when his coaching decisions or the Sixers’ competitiveness is questioned.

Rivers is recognized by the NBA as one of its 15 greatest coaches and for leading the Boston Celtics to the 2008 NBA title. However, he also has the distinction as a coach of blowing the most blown 3-1 series leads, with three.

And despite the Sixers having the league’s third-most wins (154) during his three-season tenure, Rivers could be coaching for his job this postseason.

Another second-round exit could make him the fall guy for a team with championship aspirations and two future Hall of Famers in Joel Embiid and James Harden.

As a result, Saturday’s first-round Game 1 matchup against the Brooklyn Nets at the Wells Fargo Center could be the start of his final postseason with the Sixers. Following Thursday’s practice, Rivers was asked if he thinks changes will be made if he doesn’t reach his goal.

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“You guys do,” he said. “And I’ve always said that, not just for me, I’m saying that upfront. I think that’s the dumbest thing in the world. ‘OK, you don’t make it to the Finals, so let’s blow the whole team up.’ I use this as an example, and it’s a great example. If Kevin Durant’s foot [wasn’t on the three-point line in the Nets’ 2021 second-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks], do we change the coach? What a dumb thing to do. I’m just making a point.”

However, Durant’s big foot was on the line, so his two-point shot with one second left of Game 7 merely sent the game into overtime. The Bucks eventually won the game en route to winning the NBA title.

After seasons of underachieving and internal issues — and Durant’s two-point shot against the Bucks — the Nets did fire coach Steve Nash on Nov. 1.

In Rivers’ mind, this season’s squad is the best he’s had during his tenure in Philly. The Sixers’ 54-28 record was the franchise’s best since finishing 56-26 during the 2000-01 season. That was also the last time the Sixers advanced beyond the second round. That Allen Iverson-led squad lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in five games in the NBA Finals. Despite the end result, it was a squad built on toughness.

Rivers finally feels he has that level of toughness on his roster. And Rivers knows toughness. What he sees in these Sixers is similar to the toughness he developed while growing up in Maywood, Ill., which is 11 miles west of Chicago. It’s the toughness that made him the nation’s top high school player at Proviso East High and aided him during a 13-year NBA playing career.

That’s the Chicagoland in Rivers.

“I’m always from there, no matter where I live,” Rivers said. “I just think you need toughness. You need instigators. You need fighters. Sometimes your team is not good enough. But it can be tough enough, and you can see a win.

“But if your team is not as talented as the other team, and you don’t have any toughness, you’re not winning. That’s a fact.”

Rivers got the toughness from his late parents, Grady and Bettye Rivers. Grady was a Maywood police officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant. So well-respected, he never had to use his gun in the line of duty. Bettye was an assembly-line worker at GTE and ran 10th Park, which is located across the street from the Washington Dual Language Academy.

“My dad was a cop and very tough,” Rivers said. “That’s the atmosphere I grew up in. We had the whole ‘no victims’ [saying]. That was his thing every day. You will never be a victim of the circumstance. You’re in the circumstance, you have to make what you can make, and he was tough. That was my dad.

“My mom was a loving lady, but she was tough. Maybe that generational parent had to be or maybe that was just them, but it was great for me.”

So was the toughness his uncle Jim Brewer, known as Papa, and older brother, Grady Jr., known as Gar, instilled in him. As Rivers has noted in the past, he’s become the person he is today because of his family.

His parents and “Papa” are his role models. Gar has always been a security blanket for his younger brother. And he followed in Brewer and Gar’s footsteps at Proviso East.

In 1969, Brewer led Proviso East to the first of four state championships. He was a member of the 1972 Olympic team and the second overall pick by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Brewer played nine NBA seasons, ending his career by beating the Sixers in the 1982 Finals as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers.

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Wanting to emulate their success, Rivers went on to become the consensus scholastic national high player of the year and McDonald’s All American in 1980. The Pirates retired his No. 25 jersey, making him the second player in school history to have a number retired. The first player was Brewer, who wore No. 52 at home and 53 on the road. Proviso East retired No. 53. Rivers actually wore No. 25 in honor of his uncle.

At Marquette, Rivers also had his No. 31 retired. And in 1982, he was named USA Basketball’s Male Athlete of the Year after leading the national team to the FIBA World Championship silver medal.

“I would say people see the success and they see the confidence,” Craig Patterson, one of Rivers’ longtime close friends, told The Inquirer months before dying in October. “But I think the confidence is because of preparation. But I think the thing they don’t know is Glenn considers himself, and always has, the underdog.

“Even though he was the No. 1 high school player, the people in front of him were always there. You talk about Brew, you have Papa, was an NBA player and won a state title at Proviso East.”

Growing up, Rivers’ inspiration was to win a state title. However, his teams went 23-5, 26-2, and 26-2 and won regional titles under Glenn Whittenberg. They were even the nation’s top-ranked team his senior season. But the Pirates never won a sectional during Rivers’ tenure.

“You had Papa and you had Grady [Jr.],” Patterson said. “So we had to fight Gar to do whatever we needed to do in the house, outside the house, out on the basketball court or whatever. So that was the next step to try to beat them in regards to competitions with Gar.

“Then you had Isiah [Thomas], who is from Chicago. Isiah was kind of his competition within Chicago.”

Growing up, Rivers wanted to be better than Thomas and Gar, who spent one season at Southwestern Iowa Community College. While he would eventually become better than his older brother, Rivers was never able to escape the shadow of Thomas, who went on to become a Hall of Famer.

Another motivation was not being selected by the Sixers with the 17th pick in the 1983 draft. He spoke with the team during predraft and was told he had a good chance of being selected. The Sixers opted instead for Leo Rautins. Rivers fell to the second round, where he was selected by the Hawks with the 31st pick.

“So that second-round disappointment was always a motivation for him,” Patterson said. “That and getting to the league and being in the same division as Isiah and having that competition and having to earn a spot.”

When he came into the NBA, Eddie Johnson and Johnny Davis were the Hawks’ starting backcourt. Rivers, however, started 47 of 81 games played as a rookie and took over from there.

“So I say the underdog aspect is what people don’t know,” Patterson said. “Glenn had a lot of just mentally created obstacles in front of him.”

That’s why he constantly worked on his game in the backyard growing up, even while Patterson and his best friend, Corey Cooper, were entertaining friends in the house.

“That’s probably what I would say is the underdog attitude,” Patterson said. “And it motivates him to this day. I read the Philly papers, and I read certain things and Glenn’s good at ignoring them. He ignores the noise.”

Ignoring the noise enabled Rivers to post career averages of 10.9 points, 5.7 assists, and 1.8 steals over a playing career with the Atlanta Hawks, Los Angeles Clippers, New York Knicks, and San Antonio Spurs. He made the NBA All-Star team in 1988 as a Hawk.

Nowadays, Rivers is a face of the Sixers and the NBA.

As a coach, he’s won 65.3% of his games and earned an Eastern Conference regular-season title since the Sixers hired him on Oct. 3, 2020.

Overall, he has a 1,097-763 record over 24 seasons with the Orlando Magic, Celtics, Clippers and Sixers. He has the second-most regular-season wins among active coaches and the ninth-most in NBA history. Rivers is two wins shy of surpassing former Sixers coach and Hall of Famer Larry Brown (1,098 wins).

Rivers also has the fourth-most postseason victories (104) and an NBA title. His other accolades include winning the 2000 NBA coach of the year and being named coach of the month twice this season.

Rivers has a complex relationship with the Philadelphia media and the Sixers’ fan base.

While he’s one of the league’s winningest coaches, not everyone is a fan of the 61-year-old coach. There’s a portion of the fan base that hoped the Sixers would have traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers last summer.

Instead, the Lakers hired rookie head coach Darvin Ham while Rivers remained in Philadelphia with three years remaining on his five-year, $40 million contract.

Rivers’ media availabilities last season were must-see television because he often took exception to the media’s line of questioning. That and his failure to get teams beyond the second round since leading the Celtics to the 2012 Eastern Conference finals have led some in Philly to be down on him.

Rather than focus on his accolades, they talk about his league-worst 16-31 record in closeout games.

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However, Rivers is tied with late Hall of Famer Chuck Daly for the 12th-most playoff series wins with 16. He also led a team to the postseason in 20 of his 24 seasons and made two NBA Finals appearances.

And it’s hard to blame Rivers for last season’s second-round exit. It was a trying season from the start, with Ben Simmons holding out and eventually forcing a trade to the Nets. Harden, whom the Sixers acquired in the Nets deal, also underachieved that season in Philly. And Embiid was hampered with an orbital fracture near his right eye and a torn ligament in his right thumb in the postseason.

“Glenn has been in the forefront of pressure situations for the last 10 years,” Gar said. “Well, since he was coaching Boston. Since he was coaching Boston, almost every year he’s in the mix. Folks can say whatever they want about this game and that game whatever, but his teams have always been in the mix. And he’s been in a lot of pressure [situations], period.”

The Sixers opened 2022-23 with three straight losses and were 12-12 before becoming the league’s hottest team for much of the rest of the season.

They finished with the league’s third-best record behind the Bucks (58-24) and Celtics (57-25), two other East teams. An expected series win over the Nets could set up a much-anticipated second-round matchup with Boston.

Rivers loves this time of the season. He likes to say there are only 30 head coaches in the NBA, and all of them want to reach the postseason each season.

» READ MORE: Ben Simmons (remember him?) won’t play for the Nets. Which means the Sixers face a tougher challenge.

“I just like the competition, and that’s all part of it,” he said. “The playoffs are very competitive. It’s competitive with the coaching. It’s extremely competitive with the players. I do think the playoffs are more a player’s game than a coaching game, because at that time, the players have to play. They have to make shots, they have to execute.

“We have to make adjustments, too. We have to do a lot of things as a coach. But the better they do their [jobs], the easier it is for the coach to do what he needs to do.”

On paper, the Sixers have a tough road ahead of them. They don’t match up well with a Boston squad that has won three of the regular-season’s four meetings. They needed 52 points from Embiid on April 4 to beat the Celtics, who were without starters Jaylen Brown and Robert Williams. And as good as Tyrese Maxey has been, he’s struggled mightily against the Celtics. He averaged 8.4 points on 34.0% shooting — both career lows against an opponent — in 10 career games vs. Boston.

Yet this is viewed as a championship-or-bust season for the Sixers.

“That’s how hard coaching is and people don’t get that,” Rivers said. “I haven’t had a favored team since Boston, I still don’t this year. No one is picking us. They’re picking Boston and Milwaukee. But then you hear the Sixers have to get out of the second round. But no one is expecting us to. But we believe we can. We have a 100% belief that we can. But that’s fine.

“And I always tell our guys that it’s OK to set up the expectation, whether people are thinking it or not. And when you don’t, [people say] ‘Well, it’s a disappointment.’ Yeah, it’s a disappointment even if we’re not the favorite. For us, it’s still a disappointment.”

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But having won a title, Rivers knows just how hard it is to accomplish that feat. The Sixers will need a clean bill of health and a little luck. If not, they could be headed to another early exit.

“That was us when I played for the Hawks,” Rivers said. “We never got out of the second round with the Hawks, and we were good. We had to beat Detroit. We had to beat Boston. There was another team I can’t think of, Chicago. Think about it, Detroit, Boston, and Chicago my whole career as a player.”

And now, the Celtics could go a long way in helping to define his coaching career in Philly. But Rivers said he doesn’t feel any added pressure to advance beyond the second round, where the Sixers are 1-12 since 1986.

Rivers said his focus is on winning in the Finals. To him, that’s pressure.

“That’s local pressure,” he said about advancing beyond the second round. “I’m a Bears fan. I’m using that as an example. The Bears haven’t gone to the Super Bowl in a long time. But the rookies on the Bears didn’t feel that pressure. That’s the point I’m making, Jalen McDaniels has been here for four months.

“He doesn’t feel that. He feels like he’s on a team that can win a title. That’s not what we are thinking. That’s what you guys are thinking, and I get that. And I get that from the fans, but that’s not the team’s question.”

But if anything, folks back in Maywood know he’s tough enough to take on the task.