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If you are anything like me, you probably spent a lot of nights in college up past 3:00 AM doing one of numerous things. Whether you were partying, studying, writing an essay due the next day, or watching pirated episodes of BBC's Merlin, chances are you would catch a glimpse of Popular News Source At The Time to see if there were any 3:00 AM happenings.
If you were one of those people last night and also a Sixer fan, congratulations! You were one of the few people to see Marc Stein's 3:00 AM update on the Sixers head coaching search! In case you were not one of those people, here is the series of tweets in full.
No matter how many candidates Sixers interview, coaching insiders continue to insist Philly job is going to Michael Curry or Brett Brown
— Marc Stein (@ESPNSteinLine) July 18, 2013
Philly search a lot like Houston's when Rockets last had an opening: Talk to everyone you can to download as much other-team info as you can
— Marc Stein (@ESPNSteinLine) July 18, 2013
But word in coaching circles persists that Curry on one-year basis while team tanks or Brown off Spurs' bench still Philly's top two options
— Marc Stein (@ESPNSteinLine) July 18, 2013
Latest rumble is that Brett Brown, one of Pop's longtime top aides in SA and Australia's NT coach, will get last interview Philly conducts
— Marc Stein (@ESPNSteinLine) July 18, 2013
As with all rumors, this should be taken with some grain of salt. Stein does leave himself some wiggle room here, even though he provides a finite number and list. By simply saying top two, if we get a #WojBomb in the next couple hours declaring "Easy Ed agrees to join 76ers as head coach, league sources tell Y! sports," Stein can easily back out by simply saying "I just said top two; I did not completely eliminate the viability of other candidates; if I had given a top 3 list Easy Ed would have been number 3" or something of that sort. That said....
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ANYONE BUT MICHAEL CURRY!*
*Unless that anyone else includes Larry Brown
Okay, I can completely appreciate the subtle hilarity in Sam Hinkie going "Hey! You! Right-hand man of head coach who led the team in an appalling era of mediocrity! We think so lowly of your actual coaching abilities that we want you, YES YOU!, to spear head the tank for Andrew Wiggins. 10-72 here we come, baby! Do the nerd dance! Do the nerd dance!", but the Sixers can do so much more this year from a coaching standpoint than hire a guy who will lose games while texting Doug Collins on the reg, even if it means winning 20 games this season instead of 15.
But there is reason to hope for the Brett Brown hire. Hinkie has publicly stressed in press conferences the importance of a long-term hire. Brown is decidedly that. Curry is decidedly not that. Also important, the Sixers are going to be all about player development this season and Brown has an excellent history of working on player development in San Antonio. I can understand why Hinkie might want to promote a guy to be the Tony DiLeo of the Sixers coaching staff for a year, but it does not feel like something he would do nor is it their most beneficial long-term hire.
From a selfish standpoint, hiring Not Michael Curry would make the team losing even more enjoyable because Someone Not Associated With Past Coaching Regime > Someone Associated With Past Coaching Regime. Even with impending defeats set to mount on top of each other regardless of who is hired for this season, I had been excited to at the very least watch an exciting and efficient basketball team and I do not know how exciting Michael Curry is going to make the Sixers.
In the mean time, we wait. But with time winding down and a top two list being publicly leaked, maybe not for much longer. The Sixers coaching search has taken a long while and perhaps we are finally approaching the beginning of the end of this long national nightmare fresh sweet dream that is the dawn of a new era in Sixer-land.