Built to Lose - Deleted Scenes - IV
The origins of Brett Brown, the abrupt beginning of Andrew Wiggins' NBA career, and Trey Burke's own taste of harsh reality.
Welcome, folks. My name is Jake Fischer. I’m a former Sports Illustrated NBA reporter and current Bleacher Report contributor. If you’re here, you probably know my first book, ‘Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever’, will be out May 4. It covers Hinkie’s Sixers, the post-Big Three Celtics, old Kobe’s Lakers, some crazy Kings drama, plus so much more. And if you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll receive a 30% off discount code for pre-ordering a copy.
Like I mentioned in the first, second and third installments, there’s a good bit of new information I learned reporting this book that didn’t fit between its two covers. Below is the third post of this bi-weekly newsletter you’re presently reading, where I’m sharing some of the scenes and anecdotes that didn’t make the final cut.
I.
Back in 2013, as Sam Hinkie began meeting candidates to coach his rebuilding roster in Philadelphia, the 76ers’ executive spent the spring and summer mining benches around the NBA, evaluating up-and-coming assistants and player-development specialists alike. After a famous and elongated search—which Built to Lose explores in great detail—Hinkie landed on a San Antonio Spurs staffer named Brett Brown.
A lot of Brown’s backstory is included in the book as well. He’s an integral figure of the league’s tanking era, and a lifelong hoophead who took a chance on Philadelphia as much as the reverse. Hinkie’s Sixers were far more science experiment than burgeoning franchise, after all. “Brett would have been the top assistant in San Antonio had he not taken the Sixers job and come back,” says P.J. Carlesimo, a fellow Spurs assistant from 2002-07. “It would only have been a matter of time before he got another head coaching opportunity.”
Yet Brown was perhaps uniquely fit for this position. Those who’ve overlapped with the coach unspool anecdote after anecdote about his care and charisma. That’s why we’re winding through a few of them today. There may not be anyone more deft at growing the skill sets of professional basketball players, dating back to Brown’s early years coaching in Australia’s National Basketball League.
He wore sweatsuits at all times in those days, always ready to dive into any hardwood laboratory. Brown mixed an unwavering optimism within his instruction. “I’m kind of a negative talker sometimes and I’ll be mad at myself,” says Chris Jent, a current Atlanta Hawks assistant coach, who played for Brown as a member of the 1995 North Melbourne Giants. “Any time we made a mistake or whatever, [Brown] was always, in his way, keeping your spirits up.”
The young coach would hover around the periphery of shooting drills, an omnipresent vote of confidence. It was as if Brown devised a pavlovian response to encourage his players connecting on jumpers. “Every time I would make a three, I could hear him. He’d go, ‘Ding!’” Jent says. “As soon as you made that bucket, you would listen to hear Brett go, ‘Ding!’”
By the time Brown joined San Antonio in 2002, his approach bordered on masterful. He spent all of pregame warmups out on the court, ready to spar one-on-one with any player. “He played like seven guys and he was always in a great mood and feisty and challenging you,” says legendary guard Manu Ginobili. Brown dove onto the floor to maintain possession. When he fooled a player with a dramatic ball fake, he would squeal in delight. And Brown was liable to mockingly kick that orange leather into the stands when a duel didn’t go his way. “His energy was just incredible,” Ginobili says. “It was hilarious.”
Brown himself was a good player back at Boston University. He was talented and crafty enough for individualized work with any Spur, from Tim Duncan and Ginobili to Bruce Bowen and Danny Ferry. “It really didn’t matter,” Carlesimo says. And as much as fellow San Antonio luminary Chip Engelland is accurately hailed as a shooting whisperer, Brown also played a key component in growing Bowen’s jumper. “There was no question about how important what he was doing was to our success,” Carlesimo says.
By the time the assistant met with Hinkie and Sixers ownership in August 2013, he’d contributed to three San Antonio championships, and was eager to test his strengths while piloting an NBA program of his own. Losses were guaranteed, maybe a historic number, yet Brown was energized by the idea of turning Hinkie’s band of lottery selections and raw reclamation projects into a sustainable winner. “He was not afraid of the challenge,” Carlesimo says. “He was the perfect person to be coaching a team that would have a lot of young picks going forward.”
II.
The prize for tanking through Brown’s first season, 2013-14—as several other teams like Orlando, Boston, Utah, and eventually Milwaukee strategized—was a top pick in that June’s draft. The class was purportedly unlike any since 2003, when LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh all entered the NBA simultaneously, and that’s largely why these teams, well, built rosters that were very capable of losing—let alone why this book even exists.
As that year’s collegiate season unfolded, a near consensus emerged among talent evaluators across the league: There would certainly be several franchise-changing talents available, but three stood above the rest. The only debate was how one ranked Kansas freshmen Joel Embiid and Andrew Wiggins, plus Duke scoring sensation Jabari Parker.
Most scouts valued Wiggins’ athletic makeup above Parker’s less-explosive profile. There were also questions of whether Duke’s freshman would be forced to play as a smaller power forward, where he’d school slower defenders on the perimeter, but still yield size in the post. Wiggins, meanwhile, projected as a rare defensive marvel, with the ability to guard as many as four positions using his 7’0” wingspan.
Offensively, the Jayhawks’ swingman galloped past foes in transition and displayed his shooting stroke from distance. Wiggins was capable of erupting against any opponent at any moment. It didn’t matter how well Parker scored or how rapidly Embiid progressed within his very same team. “That’s the thing that you know about bad boys,” says Kansas head coach Bill Self. “They’re not intimidated or nervous about other people doing as well as them, because they know they’re a bad boy.”
Cleveland went on to select Wiggins with the No. 1 pick that June. Embiid’s injury woes were a critical factor in that decision, but we’ll save those details for Built to Lose. The prospect of signing LeBron James in free agency also clouded the Cavaliers’ choice, and the superstar did ultimately announce his return to Northeast Ohio three weeks later in an open letter with my old colleague Lee Jenkins at SI.com.
James mentioned the Cavs’ other recent high draft picks in that opus, listing Kyrie Irving, Tristan Thompson and Dion Waiters as the exciting young core that would support his championship run in Cleveland. He quite notably omitted Wiggins’ name, and in the NBA, these sorts of misprints never seem to happen on accident.
Trade talk quickly started to swirl the NBA’s rumor mill, and Wiggins was soon gossiped as a centerpiece for the Cavaliers acquiring Timberwolves All-Star big man Kevin Love.
When Wiggins joined SportsCenter from the NBA’s annual rookie photo shoot on Aug. 4, he wore Cleveland’s maroon jersey for the interview, but fielded awkward, pointed queries about his expected new destination instead. Wiggins fidgeted uncomfortably with his earpiece. He managed to flash a smile and project some optimism, but the tension was quite obvious on screen.
See Cavs general manager David Griffin only maintained contact with Wiggins’ agent Bill Duffy. Neither the executive nor James had personally connected with their No. 1 pick ever since James had signed with Cleveland. Less than a full month into his NBA career, Wiggins was served a healthy dose of the league’s cruelest truism.
When I later found him in the Timberwolves’ locker room during the 2018-19 season, he shrugged knowingly about that checkered time period. “It’s a business side towards it.”
III.
The events of the 2014 NBA Draft also left then-Jazz point guard Trey Burke feeling quite spurned.
Shortly before that evening began, the agent for Australian point guard Dante Exum, whose father Brett Brown actually coached in the NBL, phoned Utah’s front office. The Jazz held the No. 5 pick, and from various pre-draft proceedings that I’m saving for the book, Rob Pelinka understood his client would still be available when Utah came on the clock.
On the surface, though, Exum and the Jazz seemed like an odd fit. It was only a year earlier that Utah had traded two first-round picks and leapfrogged a few rival teams to select Burke at No. 9. Michigan’s star guard jumped up from his family’s table upon hearing his name called, dancing with his childhood best friend and Boston Celtics forward Jared Sullinger.
Now watching the 2014 draft from his apartment, Burke shouted a few expletives, as negative a flavor as his previous year’s celebration was enthusiastic. He watched as Utah chose Exum, yet another ball-handler three and years his junior, before Burke’s second season even truly began.
And not unlike Cleveland’s radio silence with Wiggins, Burke heard nothing from the Jazz. Not a call from management or a text from a coach. He learned of this fate from commissioner Adam Silver’s announcement on television. “It was a real smack in the face,” Burke recalls.
Utah thought Burke and Exum could both start, with the former’s shooting and scoring ability maximized when playing off-ball. “But I felt like it was kind of them letting me know, ‘You’re not in the long term plans,’” Burke says.
He was traded by July 2016.
‘Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever,” arrives on May 4.
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