Sixers need to be pesky on defense

Gnatty. That word kept popping to mind each time the Denver Nuggets got the ball into the lane against the 76ers in the season opener on Wednesday.

Think of trying to eat outdoors in the summer, swatting away the flying pests trying to get at your meal. That's how the Nuggets must have felt Wednesday. Every time the ball went into the post, at least one hand, sometimes multiple ones, reached in for the ball, looking for a deflection, a steal or just some general disruption.

It is the way of defense for the Sixers as they are constructed. They have to rely on a pesky, smart and fast defense, as opposed to one that can gamble and wait for the big presence in the lane to swat away shots and reject and mistakes that may occur out front. They won't be able to do that until their huge center, Andrew Bynum, gets onto the court. So for now, it will be much as it was against Denver, when they forced 22 turnovers, got 13 steals and held the Nuggets to 37.5 percent shooting, including 22.2 percent from three-point range. They held Denver, the league's leading scorer last season (104.1 points), to only 75.

Much to the Sixers' delight, Denver didn't have a dominant force in the middle to take advantage of the Sixers' shortcomings inside, which includes undersized starters at the power forward and center positions in Thaddeus Young and Lavoy Allen. But Denver is much like most of the NBA, which has a shortage of dominant centers. So the blueprint Doug Collins and associate head coach (and defensive coordinator) Michael Curry have drawn up won't change all that much when Bynum does return.

"[We want to] pressure the ball at the point of attack when we can," Collins said. "We don't expect Jrue [Holiday] to get up the floor and do that, but when Maalik [Wayns] is in the game, we want him to get up the floor and pressure the ball.

"I think when you look at most teams around the league, the starting point guards aren't up the floor pressuring, because it just takes so much out of them. We want Jrue to be really good pressuring the ball in the halfcourt. In the NBA, you have to defend screen roll, you have to defend isolations, you have to defend post-ups and you have to rebound the ball. We have to be a high-activity team. On the perimeter, we are rangier than we were last year - [we have to get] deflections, force teams to make tough passes against us, [be] good on our rotations, and we have to gang rebound.

"What would my biggest concern be? If we play against a big, physical team and they have two big, physical guys - our rebounding and our low post defense. That would be a concern."

But that won't happen much this season, because that isn't the way many teams are designed. And for the few teams that can do it, the Sixers aren't totally clueless on how to defend. After all, they weren't all that big in the post last season, with Elton Brand often playing center and Allen, at 6-9, often forced to use his extraordinary upper-body strength to balance the disadvantage he had covering 7-footers.

They let go of one of the NBA's better perimeter defenders in Andre Iguodala and asked Evan Turner to embrace that role this season. It won't take long to see how Turner makes out, as the Sixers play the New York Knicks twice this week, which matches Turner and Carmelo Anthony, and Boston and Paul Pierce later in the week.

Unlike previous seasons when Iguodala would be thrown on the Carmelo Anthonys and Paul Pierces of the league and that was that, this team needs more of a team concept when it comes to defense. And with the addition of bigger, longer players such as Dorell Wright, Nick Young and Jason Richardson, that should be a manageable task.

"We're rangier," Collins said. "A lot of times guys can cover more ground. We've always been a help team. When a guy's in trouble, we've got to help him. There's an awareness that goes along with that - when is he in trouble? We don't want to let a guy start backing guys down. For instance, we're going to see Carmelo, and he's going to have that ball, and we have to have great recognition on how we're going to help, when we're going to help. And then we have to recover, because they have three-point shooting. Then you have to really be able to recover, and when you're doing that, you have to rebound the ball, because a lot of times you will have smaller guys trying to keep [a bigger guy] off the boards.

"When you're more versatile, you can do a little more switching situations and maybe run teams off their plays a little bit. We've already seen that Dorell can rebound the ball, we know that Evan can rebound the ball, Jrue should be a very good rebounder from his position. J-Rich and Nick have never been rebounders that much, because they've always been guys where they leak out and they've had big guys who can rebound the ball. Kwame [Brown] is going to have to be ready for us. He gives us a big, physical presence."

Without Bynum, Brown is really the only one who does that. But like last season, Collins is confident his finesse team can still be one of the best.

Contact Bob Cooney at cooneyb@phillynews.com. Follow him on Twitter @BobCooney76. For more Sixers coverage and opinion, read his blog at www.philly.com/Sixerville.