Report: 76ers' Brett Brown Finalizing Contract to Coach Australian National Team
The Philadelphia 76ers and the Australian men's national basketball team may soon have something in common: Brett Brown on the sidelines as the head coach.
On Tuesday, Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported Australia and Brown are "finalizing an agreement" to make him the men's national team coach for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. He previously coached the team during the 2012 Olympics in London.
Australia finished the 2012 Games with a 3-3 record, good for seventh place. The roster included notable names such as Matthew Dellavedova, Aron Baynes, Joe Ingles and Patrick Mills, but it lost by 33 points in the quarterfinals against the United States.
Under head coach Andrej Lemanis in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Australia finished 5-3 and in fourth place.
It fell in the semifinals to Serbia and lost a heartbreaker to Spain by one point in the bronze-medal game.
Neither of those Olympic teams had 76ers point guard Ben Simmons. The Australian native has plenty of experience playing under Brown, who's been his head coach since Philadelphia selected him with the No. 1 overall pick in 2016.
Brown's reported hiring as Australia's coach comes after Simmons announced in July he "will be honored and humbled to represent my country on the world's biggest sporting stage at the Olympics in Tokyo." He did not participate in the 2019 World Cup.
