Philadelphia 76ers on the verge of landing Doc Rivers as next head coach

The Philadelphia 76ers are expected to extend a job offer to Doc Rivers soon.

The Philadelphia 76ers needed a new head coach. Doc Rivers needed a new job. The two are now on the verge of coming together.

Rivers and the “brass” in Philadelphia are watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals together and a job offer is “expected to follow soon,” according to Jason Dumas of KRON4 News.

If there are no bumps in the road on the way to locking Rivers in, his next project will be to turn around the Sixers’ fortunes with All-Stars Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid at his disposal. Or oversee a changing of the guard in Philadelphia if a rebuild is in order.

Doc Rivers will land on his feet with the Philadelphia 76ers

The opportunity to bring in Rivers came after the LA Clippers parted ways with the head coach after seven years in Los Angeles. On the one hand, he got the Clippers to the playoffs six times. On the other hand, he failed to get the team into the conference finals. Twice his Clippers squad blew a 3-1 series lead in the conference semifinals.

In that sense, Philadelphia will need Rivers to get over a hump he couldn’t quite clear in the West.

The 76ers have made it to the playoffs three years in a row, but they too haven’t made their way past the Eastern Conference Semifinals. They were swept embarrassingly by the Boston Celtics in the first round of the 2020 NBA Playoffs, prompting the firing of head coach Brett Brown.

They’ll hope Rivers can tap into some of the magic that gave him success during his nine-year stretch with the Celtics. There, he won an NBA Championship in 2008, went to the Finals in 2010 and made it to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2012.