Sixers back Cheeks with 1-year extension
Deal gives Philadelphia coach more time to reach playoffs with young team
 H Rumph Jr / AP With his young team in the playoff hunt, Philadelphia 76ers coach Maurice Cheeks received a contract extension Wednesday. |
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PHILADELPHIA - Maurice Cheeks has at least another season to try and win a championship ring in Philadelphia as a coach to match the one he won as an All-Star guard with the 76ers.
A nice first step would simply be leading the Sixers back to the playoffs.
Even without a winning record in his first two seasons in Philly and the Sixers under .500 this season, team president Ed Stefanski believed Cheeks was still the right coach to guide the franchise’s rebuilding process.
Cheeks and the Sixers agreed to a one-year contract extension Wednesday, giving him through the 2008-09 season to get Philly back to the playoffs for the first time since 2005.
“That’s what I’m excited about, the chance to come back and try this all over again,” Cheeks said. “When you have a lot of young players, you hope that you can see it through.”
The Sixers have not reached the playoffs in Cheeks’ first two full seasons and they entered Wednesday night’s game against New York holding the eighth spot in the Eastern Conference.
Cheeks, in the final season of a three-year deal, is 96-122 with the Sixers.
Stefanski, hired in early December, said watching a fairly young team grow under Cheeks gave him the confidence to add another year to the contract. The two speak daily, exchanging feedback and tips on the state of the franchise, each becoming more open as the games go on.
But the Sixers are finally expected to have some salary cap flexibility — about $10 million in cap space for next summer. Stefanski plans to tinker with the roster and wanted to see how Cheeks meshed with any possible new additions before committing to him beyond next season.
“I feel comfortable with Mo, but it’s only been a couple of months,” Stefanski said. “I feel that I need more time to see if I feel this is more of a long-term thing. But things are going in the right direction right now for me. So in my mind, one year makes a lot of sense to me.”
Stefanski said it was unlikely Cheeks would have to adapt to any more changes this season. While other teams are calling about point guard Andre Miller, Stefanski said he wasn’t shopping the veteran and didn’t anticipate making any major moves before Thursday’s trade deadline.
“If a trade would come up that would not hurt our future, I would think hard that we pull the trigger on something like that, but we’ve gotten no deals that I think make sense to help us,” Stefanski said.
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