Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a team coached by Glenn Rivers (known to most as Doc, but the official position of Phrenetic Sports is that there is only one doc in Philly) loses a series despite his opponent needing to win multiple games to avoid elimination. It has happened twice in the last four years, with his humiliating loss to the Denver Nuggets with a Clippers team that was good enough to win it all in 2020 being the reason he was available for the Sixers to hire in the first place. With that loss, he became the first coach in NBA history to blow three 3-1 leads, breaking a record held by *checks notes* Glenn Rivers, who was the first coach in NBA history to blow two 3-1 leads. With his propensity for setting records that will likely never be broken, you could say he’s the Wilt Chamberlain of choking in the playoffs. CBS Sports had a great writeup this morning with more “fun” facts about Glenn’s playoff history:
He is now 6-10 in Game 7s, which is by far the most losses for a coach in NBA history
Bill Reiter – CBS Sports
His teams are now 17-33 in games in which they had a chance to clinch a playoff series, which is a brutal 34 percent win rate. It is also, again, by far the most losses for a coach in such a scenario in NBA history.
Reiter – CBS Sports
Despite my apprehension, I was willing to give Rivers the benefit of the doubt when we brought him in. The Clippers are cursed, after all, and Glenn has still won a ring, even if it’s from before Obama was president. His first season as the Sixers coach made my hopes feel justified…right up until the second round of the playoffs. We led 2-1 in that series before somehow dropping two straight against a much inferior opponent. We managed to win Game 6 to set up a decisive Game 7 at home, which was where things got…weird. There’s been plenty written about that game already, but one thing I’ll focus on is Glenn’s response to a reporter’s question about whether he believed Ben Simmons could be the starting point guard on a championship-winning team:
I don’t know the answer to that right now
Glenn Rivers – Postgame Conference
Say what you want about how it was a loaded question or how Glenn was allowed one slip-up after an entire season spent defending Ben Simmons, but it was without a doubt a bad answer (or non-answer) to that question. Even if he didn’t predict the drama that dominated most of his second season with us, he should have known that saying something like that would irreparably harm our locker room. The most important job of an NBA coach is managing player egos. That’s what separates Phil Jackson from all the others in my eyes. He made teams with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal, guys with egos the size of planets, work. Glenn should have kept the focus of that postgame conference on himself and left any player criticisms, however subtle, out of the public spotlight. The way he managed that series and its aftermath convinced me he wasn’t the right coach for this team, and the next two years of embarrassing second-round exits have only made me more convinced.
Let’s take a deeper dive into his coaching this season to get a better understanding of why we should move on:
He averaged less than 11 minutes a game during the regular season, and while that was boosted to 14 a game in the playoffs, he still played a much smaller role than he deserved, especially compared to P.J. Tucker, who averaged 15 more minutes a game while averaging fewer points and similar rebounds. The advanced stats didn’t benefit P.J. either, so Glenn continuing to put him out there when there’s a better alternative on the bench made no sense to me and made us unprepared for Boston’s youth and athleticism. He was the same way with Maxey his rookie season, basically refusing to play him many minutes until Maxey gave him no choice. He clearly has favoritism towards older, more established players which might help us win in the short term but will hurt us as we get deeper into the playoffs.
Embiid’s dropoff in the playoffs is capturing the headlines just like Simmons’s did two years ago, but a coach has 82 games to figure out what lineups do and don’t work, and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Glenn has actually used them. Even if you didn’t watch the games, you can just glance at the box scores to get a good idea of the coaching gap in this series:
These are the third quarter scores in every game of our series. If it looks like the Celtics have generally had the advantage, it’s because they have, outscoring us by 27 points total or about 4 points per game during the quarter that halftime adjustments would have their biggest impact. Obviously, their third quarter blowouts in their home wins skew the numbers a bit, but it looks bad for Philly either way. Here are the fourth quarter scores:
This also looks bad for Glenn, as we were outscored by 26 during fourth quarters, only doing slightly better than we did during third quarters. This includes blown leads at home during games 4 and 6, and this reminds me of his last year with the Clippers more than anything else. Overall, he was outscored by 53 points, or 7.5 points per game, during second halves in this series, despite the fact that he was the one with an MVP and former MVP at his disposal. This was the definition of a choke job, and this combined with his history of choking is why (I hope) he’s going to be fired.
We don’t need a Phil Jackson or a Gregg Popovich or an Erik Spoelstra just to have a coach capable of winning more than one playoff series with us. After the Raptors had their own second-round humiliation five years ago, they fired a veteran coach who was the heavy favorite to win Coach of the Year even though he hadn’t officially won it yet. That was a bold move, and it was an even bolder move to replace him with a relative unknown in Nick Nurse. We know how that played out for them. The Bucks just fired a coach who has won COTY twice and reached the Eastern Conference Finals three times in the last decade in Mike Budenholzer, which isn’t great considering the teams he’s had but still a lot better than what Glenn has done in that time. Bud also has a championship that he won 2 years ago, not 15. The Suns just fired Monty Williams, who won COTY just this last season. None of those teams shied away from firing a decorated coach when it became clear that he wasn’t the right fit for them, and neither should the Sixers.
We know Glenn’s strengths and weaknesses at this point. He can help a team that doesn’t have a lot of talent punch above its weight. Four years ago, he won 48 games and took two in a series against one of the best basketball teams ever assembled with Pat Bev and a bunch of guys who aren’t in the NBA anymore or are on their way out today. He got us a respectable record this season without Harden, and he engineered a shocking win in Boston with Embiid sitting out during these playoffs. He’s a good coach for a team that wants to make the transition from rebuilding to regularly contending for the playoffs, like the Knicks when they got Tom Thibodeau and the Kings when they got Mike Brown. He is not a great coach for utilizing All-NBA talent, as we’ve seen again and again these last four years. There’s a lot about this team that needs to be fixed if we actually want to compete for a championship, but it starts with the coach, It doesn’t have to be a splashy hire like a Bud or a Monty Williams or even a Nick Nurse, and in fact, I would prefer it if it wasn’t.
What this team needs is somebody who’s hungry, who’s desperate to prove himself, who doesn’t necessarily have a lot of head coaching experience but will coach his head off every game while holding our players accountable. That’s what Nurse was his first few years with the Raptors. That’s what Ime Udoka was for the Celtics last year. That’s what Darvin Ham has been for the Lakers this year. With that kind of hire, our regular season record might not be great, but we’ll play our best ball in the playoffs when games matter most. After the last couple of seasons we’ve had, I don’t think there’s a single Sixers fan on the planet who wouldn’t take that.
The easiest thing for us to do would simply be to promote Sam Cassell, whose name is being floated for other coaching vacancies and who would immediately be the betting favorite if Glenn were sent packing. I’m interested in seeing what Cassell can do as a head coach, and since he’s already very familiar with our players, there wouldn’t be as much friction with him as somebody hired from outside the organization. Daryl Morey should do his due diligence, of course, but out of the likely candidates for the job, Cassell is my favorite. If Morey does decide that promoting Cassell is the right move, he shouldn’t wait on it. There hasn’t been as much support for firing Doc during his tenure as there is right now, so he should simply pull the trigger, install Cassell as head coach before another team can poach him, and let us focus on next season. That’s how I believe we can start to turn things around, but of course, there will be much more work to do from there.
