It seems like centuries ago that Doc Rivers and the Celtics defeated the Los Angeles Lakers to win the 2008 championship, and for Doc it’s been all downhill since. When Doc originally jumped ship back in 2013 to avoid a rebuild, no one would have guessed the Celtics would’ve gone to 3 conference finals before him, but here we are now. After all things considered an unsuccessful stint with the Los Angeles Clippers, I don’t really understand the signing by the 76ers whatsoever. Throughout his entire career Rivers has had a plethora of talent around him and only has one ring to show for it, thanks to one of the most stacked teams of all-time.
With the likes of Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, Kawhi Leonard, Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, and Paul George to only come out with one championship is downright disgraceful, in my own opinion. Constantly blowing 3-1 leads and failing to live up to expectations is no longer just a string of bad luck and in his 20 years as a head coach, he’s had more than enough time to prove he’s not just a regular season coach. However, with a new, possibly broken, 76ers squad, is there any chance Doc can bring hope back to Philly?
After a fall from grace in these past couple seasons, it’s honestly a match made in heaven for Doc and the entire 76ers organization. The Sixes managed to squander one of the brightest futures in all of the NBA in record-time into overpaid borderline “all-stars” that don’t fit around their brightest and best pieces. Even though Simmons and Embiid are both extremely young and have room to grow, they couldn’t afford to keep squandering away chances, and as we saw they fired Brett Brown after the postseason. Seeing what the Sixers have on-roster as well as what they have in future assets, I’m indifferent on how to feel about this new pair.
On one hand, while I don’t want to defend Brett Brown, as there were zero adjustments to maximize the strengths of Embiid-Simmons, most coaches in that situation would have crashed and burned. It’s clear the keys to success for that duo is maximizing floor-spacing with shooters and clearing the paint for Embiid to work or for a Simmons P&R, and there was no semblance of that on the roster. Not being able to surround your best pieces is always a recipe for disaster, unless that piece is Lebron James, and clearly only the elite of elite coaches could make it work; is Doc Rivers that said elite coach?
Short-answer: No.
I want to make this clear before I get into it, I don’t think Doc Rivers is necessarily a bad coach, however, I think he’s severely overrated and can’t complete what people are expecting of him. As I stated earlier the general perception around Rivers has been he’s either been unlucky with championships or his team has failed him, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. Personally, what I see is a coach who is able to get the most out of his role-players, such as last year’s Clippers or say the Celtics Big-3 era bench, but when it comes to managing these “super” teams he isn’t able to get it done.
As we saw particularly highlighted this year, Rivers is slow to get away from his own schemes even when it’s failing, and it is always his downfall. No one is expecting him to get to and win the finals every year, but not even getting to a conference finals in these past years is a downright tremendous failure. This notion that he is going to be able to somehow fix these Sixers flaws is wishful thinking, considering he hasn’t been able to do it his entire career.
If Rivers is able to finally figure his coaching woes out, there’s no telling how good the Sixers could be with a working scheme around Simmons and Embiid. From what we’ve seen out of Philadelphia, and heard from former players like Jimmy Butler, clearly the culture there isn’t a winning one, and that desperately needs to change. Every single facet of that franchise is going to need to be firing, Doc to maximize the players, the Front Office to get real and working pieces, and the players to buy into the scheme and no one player trying to do too much. Let’s see if Doc makes it his entire contract.
The Closeout 