McCaffery: Despite Elton Brand’s hedge, Sixers much more than a ‘work in progress’
Jack McCaffery
PHILADELPHIA – The 76ers are good and will become better. They will gain continuity, develop a character, learn to play together. Ben Simmons will shoot 3-pointers.Trust the you-know-what.That’s what Elton Brand essentially said Wednesday in a too-infrequent, state-of-the-team address on the day his team would do what it was designed to do and wallop the […]
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PHILADELPHIA – The 76ers are good and will become better. They will gain continuity, develop a character, learn to play together. Ben Simmons will shoot 3-pointers.

Trust the you-know-what.

That’s what Elton Brand essentially said Wednesday in a too-infrequent, state-of-the-team address on the day his team would do what it was designed to do and wallop the Milwaukee Bucks, 121-109. The general manager said he has a team about to blossom now that the pre-Christmas run-up to the more telling NBA months is over. He said he was “encouraged.” And he so over-used that three-word phrase that long ago should have been banned at the Wells Fargo Center that he finally caught himself doing it. He called the Sixers a “work in progress.”

To an extent, he is right. Every team is a project in development until the last shot of the last game either rolls in or out, even if it first bounces four times on the rim. But that wasn’t the message before the season when Brett Brown sat for lunch with basketball writers at a downtown bistro and pronounced his team ready to win the No. 1 seed in the East.

Brand had provided the roster that the Sixers had asked their fans to wait seven years for, at least four of those years of the most disturbing variety, to endure. The Sixers were masterfully constructed to match up against Giannis Antetokounmpo, the sitting MVP and the reason the Bucks brought a 27-4 record into the game. In Al Horford and Joel Embiid, they Sixers had two big men who’d had success against him at in the past.

That’s what happened Wednesday, when Embiid and Horford combined to limit Antetokounmpo’s damage and expose the Bucks’ weaknesses elsewhere. That enabled them to look like the best team in the East, even if they did remain 4.5 games behind Milwaukee, the race still early.

So why was Brand so hesitant to stick to the organization’s position that it had the team ready this season to win the Eastern Conference and play a best-of-seven against a team from the West for the right to carry on at a parade?

“It depends on who you are talking to,” Brand said. “If you’re talking to me, (it’s) work in progress, we’re going to get there. Home court advantage is important. But having Joel healthy in the playoffs in May and June, that was important to us.

“And we could still grow into a No. 1 seed. But those weren’t my words.”

Not exactly. These, though, were his words, from earlier: “We know what the expectations are and we embrace it. It’s not just Brett, it’s all of us. We’re in that position now where just getting to the first round, getting to the second round, those expectations are gone. We’re expected to win big and we embrace it.”

So breaking out the No. 1 foam finger wouldn’t happen before the game, and won’t happen for a while, apparently, not even with the Sixers continuing to prove they can play with and defeat the better teams in the NBA. Wednesday, they made Antetokounmpo miss 19 shots, made 21 of 44 3-pointers of their own and led at one point by 29. They are a combined 4-1 against Milwaukee, Toronto and Boston, expected to be their most difficult Eastern Conference completion. They’ve beaten Indiana and Miami in the last four weeks.

So what else do they need to do?

“What does the team need?” Brand said. “I’d say growth, with the continuity, the chemistry. That would help us a lot. You look at the daily standings and there are teams that are higher than us. But we have beaten some of those teams, some of those teams twice. So once we get more continuity, more chemistry, we’ll be fine. We’ll be right where we need to be.”

A general manager for a little more than a year, Brand has crafted a reputation for a healthy impatience. Twice last season, he took what was good and tried to make it better. As it would happen, playing such rotisserie basketball for real proved too risky, with Brown never having enough late-season time to properly build the starting-five continuity necessary to win more than one playoff series.

With the trade deadline to hit Feb. 6, and with some salary-dump opportunities available before then, Brand knows he can take a good Sixers team and make it better. Even if the Sixers did torment Milwaukee with that 47.7-percent 3-point shooting, they need at least one more distance-shooting specialist. Brand, though, is unwilling to take that need public, something that in his business is not always helpful.

“As a GM, I will always look at any way I can make the team better,” Brand said. “But again, I am encouraged about where we are. And I look for the opportunity to watch this team actually grow and compete against upper-level teams.”

The messaging was odd, all these years later, the general manager believing that an operation that had combined for 103 wins over the past two years needed to be tested against “upper-level teams.” But the Sixers responded with a message of their own, running a winning streak to three, running the team with the best record in the East out of the building.

“Obviously, you are playing the best team in the league,” Embiid said. “And we showed that through our ups and downs, we are right there. We still have a long way to go. But we are right there. And we are going to get better.”

If so, even the general manager may admit to them being an upper-level team.

Originally Published: December 25, 2019 at 3:57 p.m.