PHILADELPHIA _ How is anybody supposed to coach in this environment?
The Sixers' most visible limited partner, Michael Rubin, on Sunday fired off an Instagram post from Super Bowl LIV like thousands of others. On the surface, it looked like just a bunch of bros hangin' at Hard Rock Stadium. It was much more than that. Beneath the surface, it exposed the overarching problem with this underachieving Sixers team:
The owners have undercut their coach.
The post showed Rubin, in the Super Bowl suite that his Fanatics company acquired, hoisting little movie star Kevin Hart. Co-managing partners Josh Harris and David Blitzer look on, smiling. So do the team's three best players: Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, and Tobias Harris.
The next night, the Sixers got blown out by the Miami Heat. They were disengaged, disinterested, dysfunctional. It was their third loss in a row, and it might have brought coach Brett Brown to the brink of termination.
The players didn't play like they were hung over, or even exhausted; they actually left the Super Bowl long before midnight. The players played like they'd tuned Brown out. One source familiar with the organization texted a prolonged laugh when addressing the issue.
One team source was asked if Brown was guaranteed a job if the Sixers get manhandled in Milwaukee on Thursday. That source offered Brown no guarantees.
Why? Because every team source we spoke to, on and off the record, recognizes that the club has festering issues that go far beyond Brown's acknowledged lack of offensive identity. These issues center on whether the players will play hard in the last 31 games, and if they will obey their coach's commands.
Why should they? Carson Wentz and Fletcher Cox won't be throwing back with Jeffrey Lurie at the NBA All-Star Game. It's simple psychology: If the players party with the owners then, when the players are unhappy with the coach, the owners will have their backs.
According to three sources in the professional sports industry, Embiid and Rubin had become very close, sometimes jetting around the country for junkets and retreats, occasionally with Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Meek Mill, with whom Kraft and Rubin are pursuing criminal justice reform. Several Sixers cast Rubin as a counselor and confidant for Embiid, who is an emotional, passionate, 25-year-old who will have earned more than $70 million by May _ a rich, entitled, young man whose psyche can be as fragile as his body has proven to be.
