After a Sixers practice in Charlotte, N.C., earlier this month, Matisse Thybulle spent the better part of a half-hour huddled around a laptop with Dan Burke. There is a generation gap between the player and coach, as Burke initially broke into the NBA over a decade before Thybulle was born. So, how does Burke bridge that gap at times?

Advertisement

By roasting his players.

“He’s got some of the greatest one-liner insults,” Thybulle said. “Just like hilarious, thought-provoking.”

Thybulle continued: “It’s never too malicious. It’s always like to see if you’re paying attention. He’ll hit you with one of those and the guys who are listening are like, ‘Oh, OK!’ Tobias (Harris) used to say when I would get a little snappy with people that I was acting like spicy. Dan’s definitely got a little bit of that spice to him.”

With Doc Rivers in health and safety protocols, Burke was the Sixers’ acting head coach on Thursday night in Brooklyn. Despite working on NBA staffs for over three decades, it was only Game No. 3 with the 62-year-old Burke in charge. The third time was the charm, as the Sixers’ 110-102 win over the East-leading Nets was Burke’s first NBA head-coaching victory.

The moment wasn’t lost on the players. In the euphoric post-game locker room at Barclays Center, Burke was doused with water. And as he emotionally addressed the team, that spice showed up.

Together.

💙❤️

— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) December 31, 2021

After he got drenched: “You got my mask wet!”

When Tyrese Maxey said he didn’t understand Burke’s horse-racing analogy: “Oh shit, you’re from Kentucky? From Kentucky! The Kentucky Derby!”

Remarking about Joel Embiid taking ownership of the offense: “You took it upon yourselves. I was OK with some of the play-calls, as long as it’s not always for you.”

It was a feel-good night for an NBA lifer. But even if Burke isn’t normally front and center, he’s heavily involved in the Sixers’ day-to-day process. And how Burke ended up in Philadelphia in the first place is the story of someone who has striven for consistency within a profession that requires adaptability to a constantly changing league.

During his time coaching the Orlando Magic, Rivers attended football practices in the offseason. Living in Florida meant he wasn’t far from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And while Rivers would attend Bucs practice, he saw up close how the team was organized with full-time coordinators dedicated to the offensive and defensive sides of the ball.

Advertisement

Rivers wondered if that type of specialization on football coaching staffs, which wasn’t all that common in basketball at the time, could work for his NBA team.

“Honestly, I wanted to do it like my third or fourth year into Orlando. I didn’t have the courage,” Rivers said. “The first year in Boston, I just thought, ‘No one else is doing that.’ And then I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m doing it.’ And I did it and I jumped into it.”

When Tom Thibodeau was hired in 2007, Rivers already had experience structuring his assistants like a football staff. But Thibodeau, who arrived the same offseason as Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, helped bring the defensive coordinator position to the mainstream. Thibodeau steered a veteran group led by Kevin Garnett, an all-time linchpin, to the top defense in 2007-08 and the No. 3 defense in 2008-09 (even after Garnett went down midway through the season).

In the following years, Thibodeau became synonymous with gritty, hard-nosed defense. When he first started in Boston though, Thibodeau was a longtime NBA assistant who didn’t have the same level of cachet. But Rivers remembered something that Tony Dungy had told him in Tampa: Whoever you choose for the coordinator, the players had to hear their voice and not yours.

The 2007-08 Celtics, a group that eventually won the title, started with a preseason European trip. The first training camp practice was in Rome. And when Rivers blew the whistle in the middle of that session, he took Dungy’s advice to heart. He said, ‘Let’s go over defense’ and promptly walked out of the gym.

“Thibs went nuts after the practice on me,” Rivers said. “He said, ‘What the fuck? What are you doing?’ And I was like ‘No, like, you’re the voice.’”

When Thibodeau protested, Rivers said he doubled down. He told Thibodeau that when it came to defense, the raspy voice that you can hear yell “ICE!” 300 times every Knicks broadcast was the one those Celtics needed to hear.

Advertisement

“And I did it like the first three days, I would walk out for 20 minutes when he’s talking,” Rivers said. “So, they knew they’re paying attention to him. And that was very important to our team. And I do it now.”

Thirteen years and two coaching stops later, Rivers had just accepted the Sixers head coaching job and he needed to fill out a coaching staff in the middle of a pandemic. Like most professions, the NBA is a relationship business. Who you know and who you’re comfortable with often matter a great deal. But when Rivers looked to fill the role of the defensive coordinator, now a common position on NBA staffs, he zeroed in on someone he didn’t know personally: Burke.

Burke had been an anomaly in coaching circles. He was hired to join Larry Bird’s staff in Indiana for the 1997-98 NBA season — the season featured on “The Last Dance,” when the Pacers took Chicago to the brink in the conference finals — and never left. In a league defined by rapid coaching turnover (and therefore, assistant coaching turnover), Burke was retained by six Pacers head coaches: Bird, Isiah Thomas, Rick Carlisle, Jim O’Brien, Frank Vogel and Nate McMillan.

That type of longevity with one franchise is exceedingly rare but Burke had made an impression with the higher-ups in Indiana. When Bird, who eventually moved into the front office, announced the hiring of McMillan, he called Burke, “my first free agent.” Burke’s specialty was defense and the Pacers had been consistently good on that end of the floor. When Bird made that comment in 2016, the Paul George/Roy Hibbert core had just finished first, first, eighth and third in defensive efficiency the previous four seasons.

When McMillan was fired after the NBA bubble in 2020, Burke’s long run in Indiana finally came to an end. But he had an admirer from two decades of coaching against the Pacers in Rivers. Both men described the first phone conversation as a relatively easy one. Rivers liked that Burke’s teams stuck to their core defensive principles, as much as it was practical to anyway. Their lingo was also mostly the same. But their main connection was through another NBA lifer who made a profound impact on both of their coaching careers.

“It was a quick conversation because of Dick,” Burke said. “When he asked me what my philosophy was, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is like Dick in New York.’ It made it an instant connection.”

When Rivers played for the New York Knicks in the 1990s, Pat Riley told him he was going to be a coach. Rivers didn’t believe him, thinking that broadcasting would be his post-playing career. Rivers was an announcer for three years with Turner Sports initially after he retired but he had been bitten by the coaching bug. To hear Rivers tell it, that was the doing of a Riley lieutenant named Dick Harter.

Advertisement

One summer while he was still playing for the Knicks, Harter invited Rivers to his home in Vermont. For four days, the two men golfed in the morning and talked about basketball and coaching the rest of the day. Rivers found himself engrossed in discussions about strategy, saying, “Yeah, that was that was what changed me completely.”

Harter was Thibs before Thibs, the architect of those legendary 1990s Knicks defenses. As Rivers puts it bluntly, “We were physical as shit, we trapped everything.” And then in 1994, Harter was hired onto P.J. Carlesimo’s staff in Portland. It was there he met Burke, who had worked as the Trail Blazers video coordinator for close to a decade.

Harter’s roots were in the Delaware Valley. A Pottstown native, he played basketball collegiately at Penn in the early 1950s. That is also where he got his coaching start, working with the freshman team. Before becoming an NBA assistant, some of Harter’s other local stops included Germantown Academy, Rider, Penn State and his alma mater. At Penn, Harter led the Quakers to an undefeated 1970-71 regular season and an Elite Eight appearance.

Those weren’t Harter’s only stops. A native of Sherwood, Ore., Burke knew of Harter from his time coaching at the University of Oregon from 1971 to 1978. Two things stood out to him. The first is that Harter, whose Oregon teams were known as the “Kamikaze Kids,” engineered a couple of upsets of UCLA during the dynasty years. The second is that Harter once infamously tripped an Oregon State male cheerleader who made the mistake of doing a victory lap with the rivalry trophy in front of the Oregon bench as the game was still going on.

That second memory still seems to appeal to Burke’s mischievous side. At that point, it was him on the younger end of a generation gap. What stood to Burke immediately was Harter’s energy level.

“So here’s the guy in front of me and he brought that fire and enthusiasm the very first day. And what he wanted, what he needed from me, from the get-go.” Burke said. “I enjoyed working with him. Just how we wanted to break down drills, instead of just walking through plays all the time, he made it clear right away. It was about doing, it was about reps. And he laid it out.”

Specifically, Harter wanted Burke to identify three to four situations per opponent that he could drill in practice. Burke would find those actions on video and Harter would then set up the drills accordingly. He was starting to get a basketball education from Harter and another Blazers assistant, Rick Carlisle. Importantly, Burke was also starting to move out of the realm of the video room and into coaching.

Advertisement

By 1997, Carlisle and Harter had accepted positions on Bird’s coaching staff in Indiana. The Pacers wanted Burke to go with them, which was a difficult decision since both he and his wife’s families are from Oregon. He eventually took the job in Indiana, which again saw him working “hip to hip” with Harter organizing walkthroughs and game prep.

Harter would coach for three seasons in Indiana, the last of which ended in an NBA Finals appearance. During that time, Burke would continue to get an education from the well-read ex-Marine, whether they were putting together a game plan or chatting about non-basketball subjects on the plane. But there were two major takeaways, the first of which is to keep the energy high.

“No matter what I do, if I’m bagging groceries at 75, I want to bring the same enthusiasm, energy he always had and the passion for everything he did,” Burke said.

The second takeaway was that, in Burke’s words, “coaching is coaching.” Before he made it to the NBA, Burke started as a high school football coach. A kindred spirit, Harter informed Burke he dabbled in coaching golf, tennis and football during his time at Penn. Whatever principles learned there could still be applied to the NBA. Coaching is coaching. Teaching is teaching.

“Just always bring it and keep it to that, keep it to teaching, keep it to get these guys going,” Burke said. “Every day I think about [Harter] because I want to bring that fire to every practice.”

It was Nov. 30, 2019, and Indiana was in Philly. The Pacers outplayed the Sixers that entire night but the recent Sixers have been dominant at home in part because they steal games they shouldn’t win. Ben Simmons quite literally did so with three steals in the last 14 seconds.

Pacers assistant coaches are interviewed for the local television broadcasts, which made the fiery Burke a fan favorite in Indiana. There is even a “Best of” YouTube video detailing his greatest hits. And the interview Burke conducted days after the loss in Philly was a doozy.

“Yeah, I hate that team,” Burke said at the time. “I really wanted to win that game. I think Embiid gets away with a bunch of crap that the league ignores. And it would’ve been a good one to walk away from.”

Advertisement

No NBA player delights in awkwardness more than Embiid, who also remembers any shade thrown in his direction (as we saw Thursday night in Brooklyn). So, when Burke was hired by the Sixers, it was no surprise that Embiid went right to Twitter.

Yes sir!!! Now we can enjoy together what the league lets me get away with #PhillyForever

— Joel “Troel” Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) October 28, 2020

“It’s funny, it’s the same thing that goes with fans,” Embiid said looking back on it. “They talk a lot of trash but they would probably rather have me on their teams. That’s probably the way he felt when he made those comments.”

The hyper-competitive Burke agreed, saying, “It took me three days to get over that frickin loss. I’m still not over it!” But Burke did get over it enough to help steer the Sixers defense to a bounce-back season. They finished No. 3 in defensive rating per Cleaning The Glass in 2020-21, a return to the league’s elite.

The former foes had become collaborators. The rim protector is the quarterback of the defense and you can see Embiid and Burke talking over strategies throughout a game, coming out of huddles. Now that they’re on the same side, Burke’s tune has changed. Talking about Embiid, he said, “I love him. He’s great, he’s smart, he watches every game, he’s engaging.”

And for his part, Burke has surprised Embiid.

“He’s way different than what I expected,” Embiid said. “I thought he was going to be old-school, extremely tough, don’t want to listen. But he’s great. Our defense has been great. Last year, this year, he’s done a good job every single day, they’re teaching us the right fundamentals. And then he’s a great communicator, so he’s been great since he’s been here.”

Burke is undeniably old-school, which is why he praised Embiid’s willingness to be challenged. But one thing he learned from Harter, who was a demanding coach by NBA standards, is that each player has different buttons that need to be pushed. Thybulle contrasts how Burke might approach himself and Danny Green, the team’s two best perimeter defenders. While Green may respond better to blunt criticism, something he heard a lot of from Gregg Popovich in San Antonio, Burke might ask Thybulle what he sees and then offer teaching points.

Advertisement

Thybulle made an All-Defense team in Burke’s first year. But when his name is brought up, that doesn’t spare him from a one-liner.

“You know, I’m still trying to find that button,” Burke said of Thybulle. “I don’t know if it’s in an Aristotle book or Socrates book yet.”

Just like Rivers, Burke is coaching a sport that in many ways is completely unrecognizable from the one he started coaching in Portland. One example Burke brings up is that the modern NBA doesn’t have many defensive specialists, players who “would rebound and guard and they would make an easy shot.” Nowadays, everyone needs a 3-point shot, which helps lead to a feeling that defense isn’t quite as important as it used to be.

In that way, Thybulle is a kindred spirit. He’s a modern-day defensive specialist, earning playing time because of his unique brand of perimeter defense while trying to make 3-pointers and overcome his offensive limitations. He can see the game through Burke’s eyes.

“It’s such a hard job as a defensive coach,” Thybulle said. “A lot of what you do is based off your players’ abilities. And it’s not like a secret that guys don’t love defense in the NBA… I can’t even really wrap my mind around that because trying to get guys bought into a system, understand what guys have to offer, and all those things and to be able to bring that all together into a cohesive unit that had — I don’t know what we were ranked defensively last year — I mean, that’s ridiculous.”

To Thybulle’s point, the coach is only as good as his players. That is evident when contrasting this year and last year’s Sixers. Embiid and Thybulle are both elite defenders but this team was built to have Ben Simmons taking the toughest perimeter matchups. Remove him and a bunch of dominoes fall in the wrong direction. Maxey and Seth Curry are a small backcourt and the Sixers are now one of the league’s worst rebounding teams. Green and Thybulle take on tougher assignments. The Sixers have dropped to No. 14 in defensive efficiency per Cleaning The Glass, none of which feels like Burke’s fault. The talent has dropped off.

That said, there is some room for optimism here. The Sixers defend at the level of a top-five defense when Embiid plays (They were lit up on the West Coast swing when he was out due to COVID-19). They just went through a month where they played a bunch of the league’s top offenses.

Advertisement

What happens with Simmons is anyone’s guess. But when Rivers returns, whenever that is, Burke will still be stressing the team’s core defensive principles that Harter taught him years ago, under a coach who also got his start under Harter.

“He allows me to coach the team,” Rivers said. “I can feel safe. You know, it doesn’t work every year. Sometimes you have a coordinator you like but don’t love and you tend to start getting more involved, which you don’t want to do because that hurts in some ways. Dan’s been great.”

It’s just that he’ll be doing that in a far different environment than the one he started in back in Portland.

“I think Dan is really special in the way that he’s able to adapt and he’s adjusted to how — I mean, he talks about coaching (with) Larry Bird and now he’s coaching like the Tyrese Maxeys of the NBA,” Thybulle said. “And it’s like, he’s been able to adapt and adjust his coaching style accordingly. I think that that says a lot about him just in and of itself.”

(Top photo of Burke: Vincent Carchietta / USA Today)