Evaluating the 76ers by their preseason is a little like critiquing a movie from its trailer: not enough information for a thumbs up or down.

In the preseason, winning is important until you're losing.

If at the end of 48 minutes yours is the team with fewer points, you haven't exactly lost. You're just working on sets, evaluating rotations, and consciously deciding that the score wasn't important.

So, trying to grasp how the 76ers might play this year based on their 5-3 preseason record is impossible.

Approaching their opener tomorrow against the host Orlando Magic, the Sixers are a mystery.

More than any Sixers season in recent memory, there are a high ceiling and a low basement. There are also important questions. If they are solved, this team could be catapulted near the top of the Eastern Conference. If they are not, it would likely drop out of playoff contention, into the draft lottery.

Of those questions, the most pressing involves head coach Eddie Jordan's Princeton offense.

Jordan, who first ran it with the Sacramento Kings in the 1996-97 season, loves the way it incorporates every player on the floor. He also employed the offense as an assistant coach of the New Jersey Nets and as head coach in Washington.

But do the Sixers understand it? Are the players buying in? Why even learn such an intricate system?

Realistically, in the first 10 games, if the Sixers are going to win while running the offense, they will need to run it as little as possible.

Such is the case not because it ultimately won't work - no one is sure of that yet - but because, as in years past, the team is most effective in transition.

At first, that aspect of the team's game will be paramount.

Through the first month, in their half-court sets, the Sixers figure to look as if they're learning a foreign language. There will be a lot of pointing, nodding, miscommunication, and guys looking a little lost and then often ending up in the wrong spot.

The offense is a framework, a set of principles. From that foundation comes a nearly endless amount of options, depending on how the defense plays.

Those options, right now, are being taught as set plays, a binder full of them. A majority of these diagrammed plays, Jordan hopes, will eventually become reads without calls. Others will always remain calls.

The team is overloaded; each player is wading through so much information. In interviews, they talk of dreaming about the offense.

At the end of a recent shoot-around, Jordan was installing another Princeton option. He asked his starting five - Lou Williams, Andre Iguodala, Thaddeus Young, Elton Brand, and Samuel Dalembert - to tack the option onto the end of a string of other options.

All the options had names: "Chin," "Forwards Out," "Reverse."

The starting five ran through the option once, twice, and finally a third time before running it correctly. After each incorrect attempt, Jordan would stop and reissue the calls: "Chin" to "Forwards Out" to "Reverse."

Because each play had a corresponding gesture - a touch of the chin, a spin of the finger - Iguodala turned the sequence of calls into a dance. (Put your right foot in, put your right foot out.)

Walking back toward half-court to his starting position at shooting guard, Iguodala demonstrated his newly choreographed dance.

Watching, you sensed this was the players' way of lightening the burden of learning such a complicated system.

The implication: For professional athletes used to learning only enough structure to exploit their abilities and athleticism, trying to execute a four-layered play call sometimes clashes with the essence of playing free-flowing basketball.

Because it's such a different way of playing, the players joke about how much there is to learn.

In traditional NBA sets, all five players are within or near the three-point arc. In the Princeton offense, the entry point is brought away from the basket, opening up backdoor and over-the-top options and leaving open space in which to make a hard rim-run (NBA slang for driving to the hoop).

While such spacing opens the floor, it also means the Sixers are starting their offense from farther away and - as has been the case in the preseason - are well into the 24-second clock before having made more than a couple of passes.

The idea is to get away from the one-on-one, come-get-the-ball culture of the NBA. It's not second nature to run a backdoor cut all the way to the rim. It's not second nature to be moving for all the time on the shot clock. It's not second nature to have balanced, equal spacing on the floor because so many NBA sets are overloaded on one side.

If all the Sixers comprehend their new form of communication, they will be able to speak to one another in a way the opposition doesn't understand.

But at first - and hopefully only at first - you might notice that they're struggling with even the most basic forms of it.

Contact staff writer Kate Fagan at 856-779-3844 or kfagan@phillynews.com.