The Sixers are currently riding a 20-game losing streak, but for better or for worse, no one inside the Philadelphia organization is deluding themselves as to what’s going on there this season.
Call it tanking, or as the NBA’s new commissioner Adam Silver prefers, rebuilding. But either way, there’s going to be a whole lot of losing as the Sixers position themselves to get better through the draft, rather than by putting the best possible roster together in order to compete in the immediate future.
That’s certainly one way to go about things, and as long as the organizational leadership is on board, the employees will do whatever is instructed to carry out that mission. Brett Brown is in his first year as Sixers head coach, and he believes that a true rebuild of the team will take between three and five years.
From Dei Lynam of CSN Philly:
Brown was speaking big picture, of course, and was referring specifically to the 20-win season that Kevin Durant suffered through as a rookie with the Seattle Supersonics. Durant also went through a similar losing campaign during a 23-win season in Oklahoma City the following year before the team had enough talent to turn things around.
There are franchise-changing players to be had in this year’s draft, and the Sixers will be in the mix to land one of them for sure. But part of this strikes me as posturing for job security. While the personnel decisions are obviously out of Brown’s hands, attempting to set expectations so low that we shouldn’t judge the Sixers until five years from now seems at least a little bit disingenuous.
