Sam Hinkie’s first off-season at the helm was nearly complete. He’d spent draft night uprooting the Sixers’ foundation, dealing their best player for a nineteen-year-old with a torn ACL.
The next few months were spent tearing down nearly everything that remained.
Andrew Bynum, the Sixers’ marquee acquisition just one year earlier, was allowed to walk in free agency without so much as a contract offer. So were other veterans like Nick Young and Dorell Wright. It was clear what path the Sixers were heading down. They were planning to sacrifice the present in order to chase a brighter future. Hinkie figured the best way to escape the hamster wheel of NBA mediocrity was to just jump right off, consequences be damned. It might hurt a bit, but the reward of breaking out of NBA purgatory was worth the cost.
Losing, in other words, would be tolerated. Winning, for the time being, would not be a concern.
All Hinkie needed now was to find a head coach open to being a part of his plan.
* * *
Bob Brown was a man of rules, a small-town high school basketball coach straight out of central casting. Short and portly with a round face, he believed in discipline and order. He was a member of the New England Basketball Hall of Fame, the kind of high school coach who didn’t allow his players to grow their hair long. Who forbade tattoos. Who required his students to wear hats when walking out of the gym and into the cold Maine night. He spent fifty-two years coaching basketball at various high schools and colleges in the New England area, winning four state titles. “An absolute legend in Maine” is how longtime NBA head coach Steve Clifford, a fellow native of the state and former assistant and colleague of Brown’s, described him.
Brett Brown, Bob’s bushy-haired son and his starting point guard, was not a man of rules. He enjoyed pranking friends. He was the kind of kid who, from the passenger seat of his high school buddy’s pickup truck, would lean over and honk the horn when driving by a group of girls, then duck below the window, framing his friend.
Bob and Brett occasionally clashed. Bob once threw Brett out of a practice. “We ruined many of my mother’s dinners,” Brett said. “It’s my nature to be a little bit challenging, and at times combative, so you jump through the hoops with him at practice, and then you’d come home and I’d say, ‘Well, I don’t agree with you. What are you going to do, suspend me from the dinner table?’” But basketball was a language they both spoke. Like his father, Brett loved the game. He loved the work. The strategy. The cheerleaders (he dated one at South Portland High School). During the winter, he’d wake up before school, pull the family car out of the unheated garage attached to the four-bedroom home, and use the space to work on ball handling and defensive slides. Brett was named All-State twice during his high school career and as a senior led his father’s team to a 29–0 record and state title.
“[My dad] was a very hard taskmaster, just a real sort of old-school disciplinarian,” Brett said. “But playing for him was just something you wouldn’t trade for anything.”
It helped that Bob’s preferred style suited Brett’s game. Bob liked his teams to play fast. He wanted his offense to move the ball and his defense to force turnovers. Brett was a 5-foot-10, lightning-quick guard who could dribble circles around opponents. Eventually, he caught the eye of a twenty-six-year-old New York native named Rick Pitino. Wrapping up his first year as the head coach at Boston University, Pitino was looking for a point guard who could help him rebuild the BU basketball program. He wanted his team to press and trap and run, and that wasn’t the only similarity he shared with Brett’s dad.
Pitino, who years later would be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, was intense, strict, and, well, a bit nuts. “He came in trying to change the culture,” said Glenn Consor, BU’s starting point guard when Pitino took over. Pitino knew he wasn’t exactly inheriting a group of high flyers or sweet shooters (BU had amassed just 17 wins in the two years prior to his arrival), so he figured instead he’d try out-conditioning his opponents. The Terriers practiced twice a day and three times on Sunday—Pitino’s way of keeping his players out of the local bars. Tape blanketed all the gym’s windows and clocks. As a punishment for mistakes, players were forced to spend a minute holding a brick in each hand while sliding in a defensive stance across the gym floor. He’d force the team to hit 170 layups in four minutes—a rate that translated to about one make every 1.5 seconds. Failure to do so would result in laps. He’d yell. He’d scream. He’d curse. He’d insult.
Brown arrived on campus in the fall of 1979. “He is a very intelligent backcourt player with outstanding quickness,” Pitino wrote of Brown in his scouting report at that time. “He should fit right in with our fast break style of play.” Practices began soon after. One day, following one particularly grueling session, Consor found Brown in the showers, nearly collapsed, leaning on a wall.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” he told Consor.
Consor talked Brown off the ledge. Brown kept working. He grew more comfortable, which allowed his skillset to shine. “His knowledge of the game was advanced,” Consor recalled. “He was super quick and could handle the ball and knew how to play point guard really well.”
He also quickly established himself as one of the team clowns. “The best thing he did was keep everyone’s spirits up during hard times,” Consor said. Brown particularly enjoyed pranking his teammate and suitemate Gary Plummer. He’d eat the homemade sweet potato pies sent to Plummer by his mother—and then deny doing so, even when Plummer spotted the orange crumbs dotting Brown’s mouth. Once, he and another former teammate were out with Plummer at a bar in Kenmore Square, about a half mile from campus. It was past midnight and time to go home, but Boston’s “T” had stopped running. The group had no money. Brown went searching for a cab willing to drive them for free. He found one—and then asked the driver if he’d be willing to go along with a prank.
Plummer climbed into the car. Brown leaned over. “When we stop, get out and run as fast as you can,” he whispered.
Plummer was terrified. “I’m a 6-foot-9 black man in Boston,” he shot back. “I’m the one who’s gonna get screwed.”
The cab stopped at a light close to the dorms. Brown and the third teammate leapt out and ran. Plummer took five quick steps, stopped, and turned around.
“I’m sorry,” he told the driver. “I promise I’ll get you back.”
Brown, a few feet away, burst out laughing.
Brown occasionally poked at Pitino too. One time he showed up at 5:59 p.m. for a bus scheduled to depart at 6:00—fourteen minutes late in Pitino’s world—and after a game the next night was forced to race the team bus back to the hotel. But Pitino also appreciated his work ethic, verve, and thirst for knowledge, and despite the clowning around, he saw Brown for what he was. “Brett was always like a sponge, always asking questions and trying to get better,” Consor said.
Brown was named team captain before his junior year and as a senior led BU to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1959. He finished his collegiate career second in school history in assists. After graduating he stayed at the university for a year to work as a graduate assistant before leaving in 1985 to take a sales job with AT&T. The telecommunications industry was exploding at the time and the gregarious Brown was earning “more than I ever could have imagined.” He’d grown up in small-town Maine, raised by two teachers who earned around $60,000 combined. Now he was clearing six figures and owned multiple properties and he hadn’t even turned twenty-five. Yet, for a reason he couldn’t quite pinpoint, something still seemed to be missing in his life.
“It was sort of a stage for me where I was lost,” he said. “I did not know really what I wanted to do.”
So he did what lost college grads tend to do: He quit his job, packed his bags, and booked a one-way ticket to the other end of the globe.
* * *
Brown backpacked through Oceania for more than a year. He bounced between campsites in Fiji, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. He fished and drank beer and hunted abalone with a knife. “You just peel them off, put them in the mesh net, pan-fry them in some olive oil—delicious,” he recalled.
But now he needed a job. He’d met a girl. Well, he’d met lots of girls, but this one was special. “I could have a laugh with her, have a beer with her. It was just good fun,” he said. Her name was Anna. She was the daughter of a farmer and living along the Great Barrier Reef, near the Great Keppel Island campsite where Brown was staying. It didn’t take long for him to discover that something about her was different. He couldn’t imagine leaving her behind.
Basketball was just starting to grow popular in the region. Maybe, Brown thought, there was a local team that could use a coach. An intermediary introduced him to the owners of a team in Auckland, New Zealand. Brown convinced Pitino, who was then serving as an assistant coach for the New York Knicks, to write him a letter of recommendation. Only after being named the team’s head coach, at the age of twenty-seven, did Brown realize, “I really didn’t know what I was doing.”
So he leaned on the lessons he’d learned from the men who had coached him. His team wouldn’t be the most talented but his players would be disciplined and in shape. He found that he enjoyed coaching, and thought he could make it a career. He reached out to Lindsay Gaze—the head coach of the National Basketball League’s Melbourne Tigers and one of Australia’s most accomplished head coaches—shared his background, and laid out his simple pitch. “I’ll coach anybody that’ll listen,” Brown told him. Twelve-year-olds, adults, assistants. “It’s all fine by me.” All he wanted was to be a part of Gaze’s program and to get a job across the Tasman Sea so that he could be closer to Anna.
Gaze accepted Brown’s proposal. Brown came to Melbourne, got married, and spent three years as an assistant for the Tigers, where he also coached the program’s Under-16, Under-18, and Under-20 teams, and worked in its marketing department. The Bulleen Boomers, who played in a second-tier league, hired him in the spring of 1992 to be their head coach. Then, that November, he received his big break: The North Melbourne Giants, one of the Tigers’ competitors, made the thirty-one-year-old Brown the youngest head coach in the NBL.
Under Brown, the Giants became one of the league’s top teams. His players, some of whom he was younger than, loved him. He was upbeat. He kept things simple. He had a great Boston accent that they could all mock. “He had this sense of humor and passion that really appealed to us,” said Paul Maley, who played for Brown in Melbourne. “He was fun, but he also just lived and ate and breathed basketball.”
Even early on, Brown displayed a knack for player development. He preached process over results. (“If we lose with the shots that you guys are missing, I quit,” he’d tell his team during cold streaks.) He had Paul Rees, a 6-foot-9 center, simultaneously dribble two balls up and down the court. He encouraged all his players to work on their outside shooting. He even taught concepts that wouldn’t trickle into the NBA for another twenty years.
“Any shot with a toe on the three-point line is the worst in the game,” he’d repeatedly say, the point being that if you’re going to shoot from that far, you’d better make it worth three points.
But as the years ticked by, Brown’s demeanor began to change. “He was capable of flying off the handle,” Rees said. He’d grow emotional and fiery and seemed to be having less fun. He’d sometimes smash his whiteboard after a loss. The Giants struggled financially, and in 1998 they began losing more than they won, too. The players got younger. They repeatedly blew double-digit leads.
“He’d put pressure on everyone, say, ‘We’re not going to let this happen again,’” Maley said. “I didn’t think it was the right approach for that group of guys. It was a noticeable change in his style.”
One night, after yet another loss, Brown fired curses at his players, hurled his whiteboard against a wall, its pieces falling to the tiled locker room floor, and stormed out. The tantrum hurt his players. Maley, one of the team’s elder statesmen, rose up and spoke out.
The next morning, Brown called Maley into his office.
“You don’t agree with me, Paul?” he asked.
“I don’t,” Maley responded. He told Brown the group was tight, that they needed pressure relieved, not added.
Brown thought about it. He approached Maley at practice the next day. He told him he appreciated the back-and-forth, but he would stick with his approach.
“This is a group of professionals,” he said. “They need to be held accountable.”
The Giants finished that season 9–21. Hemorrhaging cash, they merged that off-season with another NBL franchise. There was no longer a team for Brown to coach. By that point he was ready to move on, and being granted the freedom to explore new jobs would wind up being one of the most fortuitous events of his life.
* * *
In the summer of 2002, the San Antonio Spurs were preparing to move into a new 37,800-square-foot practice facility. Located on the Northwest Side of San Antonio, the building featured every amenity a professional sports team could want: two full-sized basketball courts, a state-of-the-art weight room, a therapy room, a players’ lounge, office space for coaches and team personnel. The Spurs were ecstatic. For years they’d shuttled between various local colleges and athletic centers. Finally they were getting a home of their own.
The new facility would also allow the Spurs to devote more time to player development. To do so, though, the team needed a coach to lead the program. R. C. Buford, the Spurs’ general manager, knew just the guy.
Years earlier, Buford had traveled to an Australian basketball camp organized by two of the country’s top coaches: Brett Brown and Lindsey Gaze. Brown and Buford hit it off, and in 1998, upon the folding of North Melbourne, Brown had an idea. He called Buford and shared his story—how he’d grown up in Maine, played for Pitino, won a championship in Australia. But now he was out of a job. He wasn’t desperate for work. The previous owners of North Melbourne had agreed to honor his contract. What he was, though, was interested in spending some time around an NBA team, and he wanted to know: would Buford and the Spurs be open to hosting him for the year? He asked Bruce Lindberg, a fellow Maine basketball coach who was close with both Buford and Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich, to reach out on his behalf.
“I had heard good things from people back east about him and checked him out a little bit,” Popovich said. “I thought that would be a good addition, just to see what I could learn from him, that kind of thing. As soon as he got there, we started putting it together, the way we wanted to run the program. We became fast friends and never changed since then.”
Brown worked as an unpaid assistant for a year. He took notes and helped out during practices and sat behind the bench during games. The Spurs won their first ever championship that June. Soon after, Brown returned to Australia to coach the Sydney Kings. Then, in 2002, he received a call from Buford. The Spurs were moving into a new practice facility and looking to hire a director of player development—was Brown interested in the job?
This was Brown’s dream gig. It offered a good contract, autonomy, security, and the opportunity to learn from the brilliant Popovich and the revered Spurs. Also, the position would free him from all the additional responsibilities that get heaped upon head coaches and allow him to devote all his focus to working with players, the thing he enjoyed most.
Brown accepted Buford’s offer. It didn’t take long for him to impress the players he was brought in to improve.
“People loved the fact that he worked so hard,” said Bruce Bowen, a longtime Spurs wing. He and Brown spent countless hours together. “And anytime I called he’d be right there,” Bowen said. “It didn’t matter if it was midnight. He would never send a film guy or someone like that. And he’d get creative with me in our drills.” The players loved how earnest Brown was. They loved how excited he’d get about their success. They loved how every year he handed out CDs of Christmas music around the holidays.1 Tim Duncan, the team’s star, got a kick out of Brown’s accent—he described it as “Bostralian.” Manu Ginóbili, a second-round pick who, with Brown’s help, grew into a two-time All-Star, described Brown as one of his “favorite people, not coaches” in the NBA. George Hill, a Spurs first-round pick, appreciated the way Brown worked. “He wasn’t just standing and rebounding,” Hill said. “He’d get out on the floor, move around, hit us. It was great.”
But it was the connection with Popovich that influenced Brown the most. Brown was drawn to Popovich’s pass-happy offense and competitive drive. He admired the way he held players and his staff accountable, how he didn’t accept mistakes but balanced his authoritarian streak by making it clear that he truly cared for those who played and worked for him, a combination of attributes that helped propel the Spurs to four championships while Brown was in San Antonio. Most of all, Brown learned from Popovich the importance of building a barrier between the job and everything else in his life.
“[He] reminded me of what’s most important,” Brown said. “Care for your family. Do your job. Don’t get distracted by the noise.”
The two men shared off-court interests too. They loved talking politics. Popovich graduated from the U.S Air Force Academy and spent time in eastern Turkey as an intelligence officer. Brown’s time in the South Pacific had sparked an interest in foreign policy. Popovich was an oenophile. Brown was more of a beer guy, but he was more than happy to crack open a bottle of red.
In 2007, the Spurs promoted Brown to assistant coach. Scouting and game planning were added to his plate, though player development remained his primary area of expertise. Two years later, the Australian national team, for which he’d previously served as an assistant, tabbed him as their head coach. The experience changed him. He never thought the NBA would give him that sort of shot. But then he led Australia to the 2012 Olympic quarterfinals, a finish that impressed NBA observers, and for the first time in nearly a decade Brown began to consider that, just maybe, there was a future for him as an NBA head coach. He loved everything about player development—from the on-court work to the lack of stress to the security that came with the job. And he and his family were happy in San Antonio. But the opportunity to become an NBA head coach—to build a program and lead a team, and also receive a nice pay bump—would be too good to pass up.
“The Australia gig changed things for him,” said John Welch, a longtime NBA assistant coach and friend of Brown’s. “It opened his eyes to the possibilities that existed.”
* * *
In June 2013, Brown’s phone rang. It was Sam Hinkie, the Sixers’ recently hired president of basketball operations. He wanted to know if Brown was interested in filling his coaching vacancy.
Brown, then fifty-two, his once-bushy brown hair thin and cut shorter and a little gray, boasted every attribute Hinkie was looking for. The Sixers would be filling their roster with players young and raw—Brown was a skilled and enthusiastic player development coach. The Sixers would likely lose most of their upcoming games—Brown’s friends described him as “relentlessly positive.” The Sixers were trying to build a program—Brown had spent more than a decade working for a Spurs team that had achieved this very goal.
Brown told Hinkie he was interested. But he also had a request. His Spurs were trying to repeat as champions and were in the midst of a tight series with the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals.
“I want to be talked to last,” he said. “Do whatever you need to do with your interview process, speak to who you want to speak to, I just want to go last.”
Hinkie, in no rush, agreed. He knew this would be one of the most consequential decisions of his Sixers tenure. And it’s not like Brown was the only candidate he was considering. Hinkie had asked his staff to submit names of coaches they thought he should consider. The list featured almost two dozen. Inside the organization some began to wonder, only half-jokingly, whether Hinkie was just trying to gather as much information as possible from his competitors.
Hinkie interviewed around a dozen coaches throughout the summer. “He was really confident about the position the Sixers were in and had unwavering faith that they were going to succeed,” said Adrian Griffin, an assistant coach at the time for the Chicago Bulls who interviewed for the job. “His attitude to me was, ‘We’re going to turn this around and build something special, and you’re going to want to be a part of it.’”
Griffin met with Hinkie in Las Vegas in July 2013, during the NBA’s annual Summer League. Hinkie handed him an iPad and quizzed him on various in-game scenarios. He asked how Griffin would handle a disagreement with management. He wanted to know how he would discipline a player who broke team rules, or arrived at a practice hungover from the previous night. The meeting lasted an hour. “On the dime,” Griffin said. “Exactly as long as he had said it would.”
Brown met with Hinkie in Houston. “I was pretty candid with Brett throughout the process, about the challenges ahead,” Hinkie said. “There has to be trust.” Brown thought the interview went well, but he didn’t hear again from the Sixers until late July, about a month later. He and three other coaches—Boston Celtics assistant coach Jay Larranaga, Atlanta Hawks assistant Kenny Atkinson, and Sixers assistant Michael Curry—were invited to come to Manhattan and meet with Hinkie and the team’s owners.
Brown impressed them all, and while in a Chevy Suburban on his way to LaGuardia Airport, he received a call from Hinkie offering him the job. Brown respected Hinkie’s background. He appreciated his analytical approach and bought into his plan. He liked the idea of returning to the Northeast. He was excited that the team was building a new training center and that he’d be able to have input into the plans. He was eager to work for an ownership group with deep pockets. But he was also wary. He’d been around awhile and seen too many examples of franchises talking about an enduring rebuild, only to reverse course and cast out the head coach as the sacrificial lamb. And anyway, this wasn’t a job Brown needed. He was happy in San Antonio. Also, Popovich’s top lieutenant, Mike Budenholzer, was leaving the bench to become the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks. If Brown returned, he’d be promoted to lead assistant, a job that no doubt would lead to future head coach offers.
“I needed to feel good and secure,” Brown said, “that the ownership group was committed and had a plan, and Sam was going to be the architect of that plan, capable of delivering that plan.”
He told Hinkie he needed a four-year deal. The Sixers were led by a group of owners with backgrounds in private equity who were not used to doling out high salaries to companies they were in the midst of stripping down. They balked at the proposal.
Brown held his position, removing himself from consideration. He called Popovich, who told him how great his life would be if he returned to the Spurs. For a day, it looked like the team would be moving in a different direction. The season was getting close. Training camp was just about a month away and the Sixers needed a coach.
But they also recognized that Brown was the perfect leader for the journey they were about to embark on. He had every attribute they were looking for, and he’d spent more than a decade learning from the Spurs, an organization Harris was infatuated with.
One day later the Sixers called him back to offer that fourth year.
The move shocked the holdovers from the previous regime. “Who the hell is Brett Brown?” was a common reaction, both in the Sixers front office, including among staffers who had spent years accumulating files on potential head coaching candidates, and across much of the NBA. Many viewed Brown as a “workout guy,” and were stunned that the Sixers would choose a coach who in the NBA had never been more than a No. 2 assistant. Hinkie wasn’t concerned. “He’s the perfect coach to get us through these first few years,” he told a colleague.
The Sixers called a press conference for August 14 to announce the hire. Brown arrived early that day and walked around the team’s practice facility. He offered thoughts about the office’s layout and smiles to his new colleagues.
“He was so enthusiastic,” analytics director Aaron Barzilai said.
Later that day, Brown and Hinkie took seats behind a table draped in a black cloth. A baby blue banner adorned with the logos of the Sixers and the cable provider Xfinity hung behind them. For about forty-five minutes, the two men fielded questions—about Brown’s background, about Hinkie’s decision to hire him, about the new direction of the team. Both men wore black suits and dark ties; sitting next to each other, they looked like a pair of personal injury lawyers filming a commercial. Hinkie’s responses, as usual, were methodical and monotone. He repeatedly folded and unfolded his arms and, with his eyes glancing around the room, often looked bored. Brown, on the other hand, was enthusiastic and expressive. He talked about how thrilled he was to be in Philadelphia, and how his team was going to run and play hard, and how he wouldn’t have left the NBA heaven that was San Antonio if he didn’t believe, truly believe, that Hinkie and the Sixers were about to do something special, and how special it would be to do so for the championship-starved city of Philadelphia.
At one point, in the middle of one of his typically verbose responses, Brown, excited, posed a question to his audience:
“Can you imagine if we can get this thing right?”
1 Everyone except, that is, Nick Van Exel. Van Exel, a one-time All-Star, had been in the NBA for twelve years when he signed with the Spurs in 2005. A black Wisconsin kid raised by a single mom, he did not share much in common with Brown. That December, Brown tried giving him one of his Christmas mixes. Van Exel refused to take it. “I don’t have anything to play that on, Coach,” he said. Brown was confused. Van Exel had made more than $70 million throughout his career and routinely rolled up to practice in a Mercedes-Benz or BMW. How could he not have a car with a CD player, or at least a Discman? The answer, according to Bowen: “Nick wasn’t trying to hear any Christmas music from Brett Brown.”