Elton Brand will lead the 76ers' search for a new coach and make recommendations to ownershipGETTY IMAGES
The 76ers are "evaluating their front-office structure and personnel" in addition to finding a new coach, following the team's dismissal of coach Brett Brown after their first-round playoff exit, according to Keith Pompey of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. The front office "relied too heavily on analytics during The Process and needs more basketball minds in the front office to balance things out." Sources said that they "don't expect" 76ers Exec VP/Basketball Operations Alex Rucker to be "back with the team next season." 76ers GM Elton Brand said of the possible changes, "I'm doing a thorough assessment of our front office. I don't want to pinpoint Alex as a scapegoat or anything like that. Our group has to get stronger, we know that. So I'm taking time to assess where we are and how we get better. We failed, and we're not happy about it, actually pissed about it." Pompey notes the 76ers hired Brand in September '18, just two years after the end of his 17-year playing career, "partly because he was willing to work in collaborative decision-making instead of having the final say." The team wanted their GM to be "someone who would be a public face and win over the fans," which "fit the well-respected Brand." But Brand said, "We feel like the collaboration days didn't work too well." As a result, Brand said that he will be "leading the coaching search and make the recommendations" to 76ers co-Owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer (PHILDELPHIA INQUIRER, 8/26).
CONFIRIMING SUSPICIONS: In Philadelphia, David Murphy writes Brand's admission that the collaboration days did not work "served as a damning and near-incomprehensible indictment of the Sixers' power structure over the last two years." Brand "confirmed what outsiders had long suspected and what insiders were all but certain had been the case." The Sixers had "entered and exited the most pivotal and irrevocable stage of their quest to build a championship roster without anyone in charge." Even after the "haphazard and contradictory flurry of trades and signings and reconsiderations that we have witnessed in the years since Sam Hinkie went out in a blaze of glory and Bryan Colangelo set the fire to himself, the admission still comes as a shock." Murphy: "Turns out, there was no vision." There was the "old front office, minus Colangelo, and a cabal of C-suite executives who nominated the man with the most political capital to be the group's designated spokesperson." The Sixers are at a "precarious moment that can easily see them return to the ranks of perennial also-rans within the next couple of seasons." Equally precarious is ownership's "apparent decision that the man to fix a problematic front office is that front office's current leader" (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, 8/26).
