Can the coronavirus hiatus turn the Sixers into an NBA Finals contender? It certainly won’t hurt their chances. | David Murphy

Shortly after the NBA season was postponed in the middle of March, there was a story about a group of river rafters who’d returned from a 25-day excursion in the Grand Canyon to discover that a pandemic had shut down society while they were away.

Most of the rafters expressed surprise at the turn of events, but if there was a Sixers fan in the group, I imagine that he or she just shrugged.

If you’ve followed this team for the last several years, you’ll know that a worldwide plague was well within the range of potential outcomes for a season that saw the Sixers enter as one of the favorites to advance out of the East to the NBA Finals.

Frankly, the only surprising thing about this year’s bit of bad luck is that it might not have been bad luck at all. The frustrating thing about the first 65 games of the Sixers season is that the nights where they looked like a legitimate title contender were far outnumbered by the nights where they looked like a team in need of a two-month break.

The last time we saw them all together, they’d lost five of nine games in addition to an All-Star point guard who had spent much of the season as the No. 1 reason to continue to believe. Although it sounds like Ben Simmons might have been ready for the playoffs had they started in mid-April, the Sixers were facing the strong possibility that he would not be ready before then. And that they would enter the postseason with a team that had spent the final 25 games of the regular season playing a completely different style of basketball than they would with Simmons running endline to endline like a beefed-up gazelle.

Now, not only has Simmons recovered from the nerve impingement that left him in so much pain that he was barely able to make the plane ride home, but he could have three or four weeks of training camp and a handful of regular-season or exhibition games to get himself into far better shape than would have been possible within the normal arc of a season.

“It could be a little bit of the silver lining of this pandemic,” Sixers coach Brett Brown said on Friday in his first public question-and-answer session since the NBA season was interrupted on March 11, “just the fact that you actually have a chance to get somebody like Ben, and as important as Ben is, back into our team.”

The silver lining goes well beyond Simmons. While it might be a stretch to say that COVID-19 has the potential to save the Sixers season, their path to the Finals looks much more plausible right now than it did before the NBA’s two-month hiatus. That is, there is now at least some plausible reason to believe in all the things you need to talk yourself into in order to believe that they are capable of winning 12 out of 21 games against three of the five teams who are currently ahead of them in the standings.

It starts not with Simmons, but with Brown, who has had nine weeks to watch tape and contemplate changes and discuss with his players and staff the things the Sixers will need to do in order to maximize their talent. How do you coach a basketball team while isolated in a suburban home? You talk with your players and your general manager every day. You hold weekly meetings with your bench staff, and your development staff, and your training staff, and you spend that time identifying what has worked, what hasn’t, and how to optimize that distribution.

“I’m excited, and confident, and comfortable,” Brown said, "like we’re going to hit the ground running.”

You have to think that the Sixers understand the opportunity they suddenly have. Whenever the NBA gives its teams the green light to resume practice, Brown will almost certainly have multiple weeks to coach his team in an environment that is far more controlled than the NBA regular season typically allows. And, really, can there be a better way to evaluate a coach than to give him two months to prepare to face four or five teams and then allow him an additional few weeks of practice to implement his game plan?

Who knows whether the original framework still applies. All season, we’ve looked toward the playoffs as an eventual referendum on Brown’s future as a head coach. Given the financial uncertainty that is sure to plague ownership for at least the next year, as well as the level of disruption that the organization has already endured, it should not surprise anybody if Josh Harris, Inc. decides that the last thing he needs in 2020 is to find a new head coach. But there’s a good chance that however much season remains, it is going to tell us plenty about Brown’s capabilities.

There are all sorts of things that could go wrong, things that are far outside a coach’s control. If Joel Embiid is not healthy, focused, and in shape when the season resumes, Red Auerbach could walk through that door and struggle to succeed. The same goes for any scenario in which Simmons’ back is less than 100%. The formula hasn’t changed -- it still comes down to the two young stars.

Still, the reason the Sixers are currently the No. 6 seed in the East instead of the No. 1 or the No. 2 has had as much to do with the players around Embiid and Simmons. The question now is the same as it was back in September: How do you maximize the skill sets of Al Horford and Tobias Harris and Josh Richardson when they share the court with each other and with Simmons and Embiid?

Back in March, it was looking increasingly unlikely that they would ever find an answer. They needed more time. Now, that’s exactly what they have.