Q&A with Sixers assistant Matt Brase on growing up in coaching and life without Joel Embiid

Matt Brase needs to call his mother.

Up next for the 76ers is their lone visit this season to Brase’s home state of Arizona, for a Wednesday matchup against a Suns team also vying for playoff positioning. But given the Sixers’ grueling March schedule, and the shaky state of the team without reigning NBA Most Valuable Player Joel Embiid, it’s “business as usual” for the assistant coach — other than a family dinner.

“I’m actually going to call them today and be like, ‘What’s the plan?’” Brase said Sunday from the Sixers’ practice facility in Camden.

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Brase, a member of Nick Nurse’s first Sixers staff, has been around coaching all his life. He is the grandson of legendary University of Arizona coach Lute Olson. He is another product of the Houston Rockets organization, working under Nurse with the G League’s Rio Grande Valley Vipers before becoming that team’s head coach in 2015. He is also the head coach of the upstart Haitian national team, and recently spent one season as the head coach of Pallacanestro Varese of the Italian league.

Brase spoke to The Inquirer about his upbringing, his uptempo offensive philosophy, and going through this challenging stretch of the Sixers’ season.

(Note: This interview is edited slightly for length and clarity)

A: You can never predict a season. There’s always things that happen. There’s always things that are out of your control. But I think Nick does an excellent job of leadership and collaborating with our staff meetings and figuring out different ways with different lineups, different rotations of who’s going to be with who and what can we run. We’ve been very positive throughout the whole thing, in terms of just banding together and finding solutions to what might come up. It’s been good. I think we have great energy, with our coaching staff, with our support staff. Our players have, too. It’s been a thing of learning and growth. No season I’ve ever been a part of is perfect. There’s always people in and out of the lineups, and you’ve just got to deal with it and control what you can control.

A: He’s just great at perspective and looking at the big picture. Just, how can we keep getting better every single day with who’s available, who’s ready to go that day? Nick’s always been good on that, of just kind of, “How can we get better today with what we have?” And then that’ll build toward the future when we start putting more pieces back together.

A: There’s a lot going on. But there’s also a lot of touch points where we’re at practice, we’re at shootaround, we’re on the road and it’s before the game. There’s just a lot of time to have conversations on the road at the hotel, before film, after film. The players do a good job of asking questions when they’re not sure or if we’re not clear enough with certain things. We do a really good job when the group’s together on the court — whether it’s at a shootaround or a practice — of being detailed and clear of what our expectations are for that day.

A: My style is kind of more laid-back, more teacher approach of learning and working with players to get them better. It’s just kind of a process of collaboration of coach-player in terms of improvement. I’ve been a very offensive-minded coach with Mike D’Antoni in Houston and stuff like that. Nick’s perspective on the defensive end has been very, very good for me in terms of my development, too, of just of different ideas and different coverages: man, zone, press, blitzing, trapping, switching, whatever it may be. I think it’s been good for my growth of a different lens of seeing the game a different way. When you’re on different staffs, you learn different things. When I was in Portland, you learn different things from Chauncey [Billups]. When I was in Houston, it was Mike D’Antoni and it was Kevin McHale. You kind of always learn, and you just have a diverse background of who you’ve worked with and what makes sense to you and what you can add and what you like.

The thing about Nick is that no idea is a bad idea. It’s one of those things where we’ll be like, “Hey, why don’t we try this against this player?” It’s like all right, we get on board, we talk about it in our staff meetings, we communicate it with the players. And each game is different. Credit to our players, too, for adapting pretty well and taking in the coaching.

A: Postgame, I kind of have an offensive lens on some things. The assistant coaches all kind of pull different things, and we all send it in together and it’s a collaboration of different things that we see in the game. It’s one of those things, like, you can watch the same clip five different times, and on the sixth time, you’re like, “Well, I didn’t see that the last time.”

You might be looking at a certain player or a certain action going on and thinking one thing, and then there’s another defender on the other side of the court that you don’t see. So we kind of will make sure we have a lot of eyes on it. You’re never going to really see everything, but see the most we can, and maybe see something someone else doesn’t see.

A: When he took the job at Arizona from Iowa, I was 2 years old and our whole family moved with him. Aunts, uncles, cousins. It was like, “Papa Lute’s going to Tucson. We’re all going.” I don’t know any different. From his house to the university, our house was on the way, so he’d pick up me and my sister and we’d go to practice. That’s what we knew. McKale [Center] was like home to us. We knew it was just our thing. You think everyone’s like that. You don’t know how special it is until you get older.

Even things like, I grow up in McKale when it’s sold out every game. I’m a ball boy. I’m running around the locker room. And then, when I was a walk-on for the team for my grandfather, we’d go on the road and play somewhere and it wasn’t sold out, and I was like, “Why isn’t this arena full that we’re playing in?” That’s gaining a whole perspective of that college basketball’s college basketball, but it’s not equal everywhere, I just always loved basketball, and it was just what I knew. It was you go to school, and you play basketball, and that’s it.

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I went to junior college at Central Arizona, and then I was deciding what I was doing after that. I called my grandfather and asked about being a walk-on, because I just wanted to be around the game and keep playing, but not necessarily go really far today. And he was like, “Yeah, we can find a spot.” Then, after that, I just wanted to stay in the game any way possible. I had a real job for a year after graduation. I got a business degree and worked at this place called Hamilton AeroSpace Technologies, and there wasn’t love and passion. It was like, “This is it?” Then I was fortunate a spot opened up on [Olson’s] staff. I was video coordinator and director of player development, and was just around him and coaching.

It was just kind of a lifelong journey of not knowing any different. There wasn’t a moment where it was like, “I want to be a coach.” I was just always around the game. It’s one of those things where I can be in here all day at the facility, watching film or working out players or whatever it takes. It’s just a heartbeat of my life. And when I go home, I watch NBA and college games. I’ve kind of had the blinders on. I just do basketball. I don’t worry about anything else going on, which is a nice thing to do.

A: One thing that I always think about is, when I was on staff, he always gave us the thing that you haven’t taught until they learned. If the players ran a play wrong or did something wrong that we had coached them on, it means, no, we haven’t taught them yet. There are different learning styles. Some players, you can talk to them, and they get it. Some, they watch film. Some, you’ve got to walk through it on the court with them. Some may need two of those three. Some might need all three. I learn in a different way than other people learn, as well. There’s some things to me that don’t make sense, but if I see it a different way, it makes sense. If the players aren’t doing it right, how do we find the solution to teach them so you can get the result that you want? That was just kind of a teaching-type thing that I think about a lot.

Strategy-wise, we were uptempo at Arizona and attacking the rim and playing faster than most other teams did at the time. I just kind of liked that style but didn’t know why and hadn’t studied all the other stuff. When I really got in on that was when I was in Houston, and the data behind it and backing it up, like, this is why you do these things. Without knowing, I knew that was a style and a way I liked to coach. I think players like playing in it, and fans like watching it. And I think you can be very successful playing that way as well.

A: I got a front-office internship with the Rockets. It was Coach McHale’s first year there, and it was coming out of the lockout year. So I was already in Houston with meetings and doing stuff, and the coaching staff showed up. Our office was kind of down there, too, and I was doing stuff on the court with some of the players. Kyle Lowry was on that team, Marcus Morris was on that team. Nick was our G League head coach, but because of the lockout year, we didn’t have a full training camp of stuff together. Nick was kind of down there and I’d watch the games, because Marcus was getting assigned back and forth.

That offseason, the Rockets approached me about going the front-office route or more the coaching route. I wanted to go the coaching route. Nick got back to Houston from RGV, and I remember I met with him and it was basically, like, “So do you want to do offense or defense?” And I was like, “Offense.” And he was like, “Do you want to work with the bigs, or the wings, or the guards?” And I was like, “The wings.” He was like, “All right, sounds good. Come work for me next year.” It was a quick conversation in the conference room. It was my first assistant coaching job in the pros. I had done it at Arizona, but it’s a whole different game. So I’m fortunate to be with Nick.

[Fellow Sixers assistant] Doug West was our other assistant. Two of our player-development coaches Toure’ [Murry] and Terrel [Harris] were on the team at parts of the season. And it was a great season. We won the championship. It was just an awesome year to be a part of, with that team. A lot of years later, we’re all back together again, and it’s awesome. Nick’s a guy I’ve always been in touch with and obviously seen around the league, when I was in Houston and he was in Toronto, or when I was in Portland and we’d see each other at Summer League. It just worked out perfectly that he came here and there was an opportunity for me on staff.

A: The Haitian national team is an awesome project that I’m in with a couple guys. It fills our heart up, because it’s a third-world country, they’re obviously going through a lot of stuff right now, and it’s just, like, we want to help bring them joy. I think sports can bring people together and bring people happiness for a certain amount of time during your day or during parts of the year. We volunteer down there. I’ve been to the country a couple times. We played in a tournament, which we did very well in. We’ve done mini camps for guys. It’s just one of those things where we want to keep growing it and we want to keep evolving. We were supposed to play the summer of 2020 in a qualifier, which obviously got canceled. So we’re just waiting for FIBA to have another tournament. In the Caribbean, there’s a level A and a B, and we’re in B.

Last year coaching in Italy was awesome. Luis Scola owns the team, and I was an assistant coach in Portland and I still had years left on my deal. It just became one of those things of betting on yourself. Let’s go coach in another league. I had been a head coach in the G League for three years, and it gave me another opportunity to be a head coach. I was just, like, “I want to go do this again. I want to go play a certain way and play fast and play uptempo and see if it works somewhere else.” It was a risk I took to bet on myself. I went over there and we had an awesome season. In all of Europe, we were the fastest team. In the Italian basketball, we were like the second-highest-scoring team in the past 20 years. We were a show in town. We had a 5,100-seat arena. After our first couple games, it was sold out the rest of the season. We were fast. We were fun. The city was behind us. The crowd was behind us. It was an awesome, awesome opportunity, I had five Americans on my team and six Italians. We had the lowest budget in the league. We were kind of that underdog team of, just, let’s fight through, and we ended up being tied for fourth at the end of the day.

You’ve got to get uncomfortable sometimes, and I went and got uncomfortable. I lived in a country where I didn’t know anyone. I was in Varese, like 45 minutes away from Milan and an hour to Lake Como. Beautiful, beautiful city with 80,000 people. I had this spot on the side of what’s called Sacro Monte, or Sacred Mountain, with a walkway up. It was just beautiful. When you think of Italian cities, that’s what it was. It just gave me the chance to coach the way I wanted to, and it had very, very good results.

So it was a fun journey. I made friends for life out there. It was nothing I’d ever aspired to do, but they called me and kind of put it out there and sold me on it. I said, “Let’s go do this.” It was a risk, but I look back now and it’s like, I’m here in Philly with Nick, and it was a good little chapter in the book. It was 10 months. It was stressful. It was hard. But I think, at the end of the day, once you get through hard parts, it makes you a better coach, person, all that stuff, after just fighting through things. It was good for me to get a little uncomfortable.

A: We’re a hard-working group, and we’re putting everything into it every day with what we have. We have a heck of a roster when healthy. We’re tough to beat. I think we’re fighters. We’re going to try new things. We’re going to give it our all. I think that’s what the fans need to know. We’re 100% behind this thing of going all-in. We’ve got one goal, and that’s to put another banner up there. Second place isn’t good enough for us. We’re trying to win the whole thing, and that’s why we’re here and that’s why we coach.