Not just Brett Brown’s son, Sam Brown wins big at Lower Merion

December 2019, Sam Brown’s high school basketball debut, and who knows? Maybe the public-address announcer thought it would be a hoot. Lower Merion vs. Abington in the Fred Pickett Classic at Chester High School, and the voice was so smooth, the delivery so straight and free of embellishment, that maybe the public-address announcer just thought, with all good faith, that he should note the noteworthy. Maybe — and we’re talking a slim chance here, but possible nonetheless — the public-address announcer thought that there might be someone in the half-empty gym who didn’t know the ins and outs of Sam Brown’s bloodlines.

Maybe. But probably not.

So … player intros for the Aces, first varsity game for a 14-year-old lefty freshman with floppy brown hair, the kid sitting on the bench as the names of the other four starters, all of them older and more experienced, were called before his, and hell, yes, this guy was going to say it. This guy was going to remind Sam Brown how difficult it might be for him, over the next four years, to forge his own identity, to prevent people from reducing him to nothing more than his father’s son.

Ninth grade … number 11 … son of 76ers head coach Brett Brown … Sam Brown.

High in the bleachers behind the Lower Merion bench, Brett Brown hid in plain sight, wearing a gray fleece and red sneakers, sitting in the kind of indifferent slump that the famous affect when they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. His wife, Anna, sat to his right, his daughter Laura to his left. He was in the midst of his seventh season as the Sixers’ head coach. Eight months later, he was fired. It was an ending for him. It was a beginning for him and his son.

Hugging the western border of the city, Lower Merion Township is a magnet for the families of Philadelphia celebrity, its century-old stone mansions and split-levels shaded by cherry trees, its aristocratic sensibility cut with pride in the diverse student bodies of its well-regarded schools. Because the Sixers practiced and trained at St. Joseph’s University and Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine for so long, the Main Line’s suburbs have long been a convenient and comfortable draw for their executives, coaches, and players.

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Allen Iverson lived there. Sam Hinkie lived there. Kobe Bryant lived there, and the reason that he, as a 16- and 17-year-old, was able to spend the summer of 1995 scrimmaging against several Sixers players was that the team’s coach at the time, John Lucas, lived there, too. Gregg Downer, who has been Lower Merion High’s boys basketball coach for 32 years, and Kevin Grugan, who has been his assistant for 14, take it for granted: There’s a good chance they’re going to coach a kid with a familiar surname. Yohanny Dalembert, the half-brother of former Sixers center Samuel Dalembert, was on the team a few years ago. Teddy Pendergrass III, the grandson of the soul singer, is on the team now.

So is Sam Brown, who could be defined by a dozen different facts but only now, as he’s about to begin his senior season, can shed the shadow of his father’s former job. Sam Brown is the best player on a team that has won back-to-back PIAA Class 6A District 1 championships. Sam Brown is a Penn recruit; he committed early, in May, and will enter the Wharton School.

Sam Brown is a citizen of both the United States and Australia, and because he attended dual-language schools while his family lived in San Antonio, he speaks fluent Spanish. Sam Brown is a 6-foot-2 guard who has started every varsity game he has ever played, who shot a cool 40% from three-point range last season, who has made 165 three-pointers in his career, the most by any Lower Merion player since 2006.

Sam Brown has two elder sisters, one of whom, Julia, lives in Ardmore and holds two jobs despite a developmental disability. Sam Brown has scored 794 points and, barring injury, will eclipse the 1,000-point threshold this season, despite playing just 17 games as a sophomore because of the pandemic and missing seven games last year because of a badly sprained ankle.

Sam Brown has a best friend, Cam Gordon, whom he has known since fourth grade, who is a boys’ basketball team manager, who frequently joins the Browns for dinner. Sam Brown aspires to play in the Olympics someday for the Australian national team, and it is not a pipe dream. “He has the potential to wear the green and gold in the future, no doubt,” said Peter Lonergan, the national program’s director of performance. Sam Brown is taking advanced-placement psychology and advanced-placement economics and advanced-placement statistics and scored a 4 out of 5 last year on the national advanced-placement calculus test.

Those are the details of Sam Brown now, but until the ball was tipped against Chester that afternoon four years ago, there was only one detail that mattered. Hearing that announcer’s voice describe Sam in that manner, right out of the chute, struck and stayed with Grugan. He’s going to be The Son of Brett Brown for the next four years.

“It was pretty stark to hear that right away,” Grugan said. Starker still was Sam’s response: He took Lower Merion’s first shot of the game, a three-pointer from the right wing. He swished it. Then he took another three. He was fouled and made the subsequent free throws. Then he drilled another three. He scored the team’s first nine points, finishing with a game-high 19 in that victory over Abington.

It never got much worse than that. Sure, there was the random obnoxious parent or teenager who shouted from the stands or fired off a direct message on Instagram just to say that Sam’s dad stunk, and there was that game at Harriton when one side of the gym started chanting, FIRE BRETT BROWN! at him. But he regarded those episodes as inevitable and beneficial, as rites of passage that his father, from the moment the family moved to the area in 2013, warned him were ahead.

Selective deafness: That was the term that Brett used with Sam to describe the quality that Sam would have to wield to withstand the privilege — another Brett term — of playing in a proud and expectant basketball city and having his father coach that city’s NBA franchise. And not at just any time in that franchise’s history, but as it was embarking on the most controversial rebuilding strategy the league had ever seen, as its owners and the architect of the strategy, Hinkie, were making it clear that winning games in the here and now was not their highest priority.

So the two of them started a conversation when Sam was 8 and kept it up thereafter. Brett would explain to Sam what the Sixers’ plan was, why he had chosen to buy into it, why he believed that Hinkie was on to something, how the payoff — if The Process worked — could be huge. “Hinkie: so underrated,” Sam Brown said. The challenge would be surviving the criticism and the mockery and the doubts about whether his dad really knew anything about basketball and the assertions that any man who would agree to coach a team that was trying to lose must be a loser himself — all of which would bleed into Sam’s daily life as he negotiated adolescence. The scrutiny and the heckling would have to harden him, toughen him, teach him to control his emotions and shut out the racket. He couldn’t throw a punch at a kid who was riding him about the latest Sixers loss, couldn’t gesture to a raucous rival crowd and let everyone know that the chants were getting his goat.

“I’m really glad that happened,” he said. “It was a developmental time where you have to reflect, ‘How can I handle something like that and not be fazed by it?’ It was a compliment to me in some ways that they thought I was worth chanting at. At some point, you realize there are worse things in life than being yelled at by random people you don’t know.”

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Besides, as it turned out, he had to put up with that pressure for only so long at Lower Merion, for just 28 games in his ninth-grade year. That March, the pandemic stopped the Aces’ season, and everything else, cold. And that August, after the Boston Celtics swept the Sixers in four games in the first round of the playoffs, those Harriton students and fans got their wish.

“Sam was raised in this building,” Brett Brown said over his cellphone one morning in late September. He was in San Antonio, inside the Spurs’ training facility, back as an assistant coach under his friend and mentor Gregg Popovich, back with the franchise he was with for 13 years before the Sixers hired him.

Brett has video of every game, at every age, at every level of basketball, that Sam has ever played. He keeps a photograph on his phone of Popovich at the facility, crouched in a defensive stance, guarding Sam along the left baseline. Sam was 5 at the time. “I don’t care if you’re 4 or 24,” Brett said. “People learn the quickest and easiest by seeing themselves, and people love seeing themselves.”

So how can anyone pull apart those intertwined threads — Sam’s desire to be his own person and player and the upbringing that has allowed him to be that person and player? Remember: This isn’t just about Brett. This isn’t just about a dad who was a point guard for 113 games at Boston University, who has coached in the NBA for two decades, who had been the head coach of the Australian national team for three years, including at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London — “a doyen of Australian coaches,” Lonergan said.

This is also about Bob Brown, Brett’s father and Sam’s grandfather, who won 600 games over 42 years as a renowned college and high school coach in New England, who watches Sam’s Lower Merion games online and counsels him to crouch lower in his defensive stance, to make his dribble firmer and his first step longer, to clean up a million small fundamental flaws that an 85-year-old retiree would point out and an AAU coach might not.

“There’s a family component that trumps everything,” Brett said. “After you go through the normal human things, the character-building things, you say, ‘What can I help him with?’ If I was a plumber, maybe I could teach him a little bit more about that trade. If I was into some level of business, maybe I’d help him learn that. But I’m in basketball. It’s what the Browns know.”

So Sam would know it, too. Better yet, he wanted to learn it. In San Antonio, he could play one-on-one against Manu Ginobili, then banter with him in Spanish afterward. In Philadelphia, he could take the court at PCOM or, later, the Sixers’ headquarters in Camden, receive tutoring from the interns and video coordinators who aspired to become and eventually became full-time coaches, or try to pull a crossover on Nerlens Noel or T.J. McConnell or Joel Embiid — the pros here with whom he bonded most.

When he needed to hone his jump-shooting form, he could use one of the facility’s toss-back systems, lofting shots over the nets encircling the rim until giving his jumper a high, rainbow-like arc became habitual for him. When he felt a pop in his calf muscle or tightness in his hamstring, he could ask a Sixers trainer to examine him, and the recommendations and advice taught him how to be in better tune with his body, to recognize when a sore ankle meant he needed to rest and when it meant he needed to get to a doctor.

The why of things mattered to him. Grugan, in his 16th year as a math teacher at Lower Merion, saw it during basketball practice and in the two courses in which Sam was one of his students: honors pre-calculus and advanced-placement calculus. Sam earned A’s in both, an achievement he regarded as comparable to anything he has accomplished related to basketball, given Grugan’s standards. “You don’t want him as a teacher,” he said. “He is brutal.” But to Grugan, Sam’s approach to academics and athletics was a truer testament to his maturity than his GPA or his scoring average might be. In the classroom, he didn’t ask how to earn extra credit on a test or what utility calculus would have for him later in life.

“He wanted to understand why the math worked as it did,” Grugan said. “That’s kind of cool.” On the court, he would put a drill on pause with a question: Coach, why are we running this stagger screen to the backside if we’re starting the play on this side of the court?

Without that curiosity, without his lineage, maybe he wouldn’t have returned at all from the sprained ankle and the hip injury that hampered him last season at Lower Merion, because maybe he wouldn’t have taken the time to understand how to rehabilitate those injuries, how to play through the aches and soreness, and why those measures would work. And at the Australian U-19 camp last summer, maybe he would have pushed himself to play through a stress fracture in his foot — he has been invited to the final training camp in June 2023 and can still try out for the team then — instead of limiting his participation, immersing himself in the team’s practices and activities just by observing, holding back to let himself heal.

The advantage that Sam Brown or anyone like him derives from being the child of a pro coach or athlete isn’t nepotism or genetics as much as it is marination in the culture that the youngster aspires to inhabit when he’s an adult. It was true when Kobe Bryant, son of Joe, played at Lower Merion, and it is true now that Sam Brown, son of Brett, does.

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“There is a rhythm to their day that the good pros have,” Brett said. “There’s a pride in lifting weights. There’s a knowledge of gym time. There’s a knowledge of what you do in a gym: dribbling, shooting, whatever. There’s a knowledge of paying attention to the sport: What are your peers doing? Where’s everybody else going? That whole professional way that the NBA forces you to have or you ain’t going to be in it very long, that’s all he’s heard me talk about. That’s all he’s ever seen.”

The scenario was familiar; the decision simple: A family from out of town moves to the Main Line. The family has a son who excels in basketball. What’s the right path for him? The Catholic League? One of the academies in the Inter-Ac? Nah. Lower Merion High School was five to 10 minutes down Montgomery Avenue from the Browns’ house, and in the 2012-13 season, just months before Brett became the Sixers’ head coach, the Aces went 30-3. No need to go school shopping. Just drop Sam into the district, let him snake his way up into Downer’s program — with its facilities and finances; with its strong alumni support; with an NBA shooting coach, Dave Stotter, donating his time and expertise to the Aces and eventually to Sam — and let that system work for him. The system completely turned over Lower Merion’s roster in 2019, 11 of 12 players graduating, allowing Sam to start that fall as a freshman.

“Gregg would say to those guys in practice, poking at them a little bit: ‘It doesn’t matter what you do now. Sam Brown is coming to this building next year, and he’s going to eclipse anything you guys have ever achieved,’” Grugan said. “I knew a little about Sam then. But for a freshman to come in and start immediately and have that burden was something. I call it a burden because of the way the Philly sports culture is. If you’re associated with something that isn’t winning enough, everyone around you takes it on to some capacity.”

But the burden was easier to bear for the advantages he had, and he gained a few more after his father was fired. “At the end of the day,” Brett said, “the Sixers were good to me. My time was up.” Now Brett could give himself to Sam and the program in a way he didn’t and couldn’t before.

As a ninth grader, Sam had been a fawn, a skinny, one-dimensional player, a shooter and little more. Now he and Brett would drive to Lower Merion at 6 a.m. to get in an hour of gym time before the school day began. Now Brett could do more than just review film from time to time, at Downer’s request, and make a few recommendations. Now he could invite the Lower Merion coaching staff to his home for dinner and brainstorming sessions: the ways to weave the Spain pick-and-roll into the Aces’ offensive sets, the upside of having a center play drop coverage on screens, ball-pressure packages that worked against the Lakers and Raptors and could work against Ridley and Penncrest. Now, instead of trying to blend into the background on those rare occasions that he could attend one of Sam’s games, he could …

… live 1,700 miles away in a San Antonio hotel, grinding away as Popovich’s right-hand man again, while the rest of his family stays in Wynnewood and Sam finishes high school and moves on to Penn? Yes. Pop asked, and he said sure. This is the latest stage in his career, and not even he knows yet what the next one will be — or if there will be another. Maybe he’ll succeed Popovich with the Spurs. Maybe his desire to see Sam play at the Palestra over the next four years will supersede his desire to continue coaching. Maybe he’ll call it a day and come home.

By then, a scene in a Lower Merion gymnasium on a mid-October evening will have become routine for his son: A preseason workout among 15 players, Sam Brown the strongest and most skilled among them by such a wide margin that he seemed to stand alone and apart, snuffing one kid’s shot, scoring quickly with a left-handed layup over an underclassman, his friend Cam Gordon holding an iPad in his lap and tracking every player’s performance in every drill on a spreadsheet, as if the Lower Merion Aces had an analytics department all their own.

Excel and apps and Google Docs: High school basketball is a long way from a time when such technology would be unusual and innovative, a long way from pencils and notepads and dry-erase markers. But then, a unique advantage today can morph into a humdrum fact of life tomorrow — a truth that one player on that court knew better than anyone else. “Now everyone treats him as if his dad is just his dad,” Gordon said. “People just know him as Sam.” Which is, of course, the entire point.

Editor’s note: Mike Sielski is the author of “The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality.”