Have you found yourself rooting for JJ Redick yet? Or just accepted the fandom?
Haha you've asked me this so many times. He's too streaky for me to full on fanboy, but his DHO with Embiid is such a ridiculously fun play.
Listened to a good Sixers podcast ep about Brett Brown this morning on my commute. Common fan critiques are:
1) His rotations
This is overly broad, but he's got the roster he's got. The starters are basically the best 5 man rotation in the league. Then after that the most serviceable backup they have is...Mike Scott. He should never run Ben and TJ out together if it can be avoided unless you wanna put Ben in the dunker's spot. And in the playoffs, Ben will be an issue against teams like Milwaukee and Boston who can really exploit non shooters and stop you from getting in the lane. This will be Brett's biggest challenge.
2) Not running enough Pick and Roll
They compared the best offenses to the teams who run the least pick and roll, and it's pretty much a direct map. Sixers are second lowest total PnRs run, Golden State is least, and 7 of the 10 best offenses in the league were in the 10 least PnRs run. Sixers do have the second highest efficiency rate in the league when running the PnR, so they could run it more, but it's a personnel thing again. You don't want Ben running it. They run it with Jimmy at the end of games, and you could probably run it with him a little more to get him in the offense a bit. Maybe the best area to expand this is with Tobias, who has great chemistry with Boban, but otherwise seems to thrive in iso, transition, and second chance scoring. We don't really run a lot of plays, full stop. Seems like we do set up in the halfcourt almost exactly the same on every set as a way of teaching Joel about how to recognize doubles, and Joel has cut down his turnovers every year for it.
3) Running too much Dribble Hand Off
It works. We run it a lot because we have the best DHO guy in the league, JJ.
4) Turnovers
This was another interesting stat--basically the teams that run the best offenses in the league do turn the ball over quite a bit. The teams with very low turnover numbers are teams like Charlotte and Orlando whose offense really sucks. That's a coaching deficiency. If you're overvaluing protecting the ball rather than trying to generate the best shot, you're not doing offense correctly. Golden State turns the ball over at a very similar rate to the Sixers because they're constantly looking to find the best shot. The worrying thing about turnovers is really that we're not generating a ton of turnovers. Jimmy hasn't really given us the defensive havoc that Covington gave. He's got good tip/steal numbers in passing lanes, but he's not really doing it on ball. He also sells the fuck out too hard too much.
Things Brett has done very well:
1) Keep the roster happy
This year has basically been three completely different teams given how much the team has changed. And Ben and Joel have seemingly gotten closer throughout it. That's a testament to Brett for sure.
2) Draw up plays out of time out
Basically the best in the NBA at this. We score more in the halfcourt out of timeout than any team in the league.
3) Manage Embiid's minutes
Embiid is gonna get to 65 games this year barring some injury, and that's pretty good. Think Brett does a really good job picking spots to rest him in games. The Sixers are gonna win somewhere between 50 and 55 of those games, which is also very good.