Hot off the Suns, Sixers hope Memphis makes three

When the 76ers try again tonight to match their season-high winning streak, they will be more susceptible to a letdown than the last three times they tried it.

The Sixers go for their third consecutive victory tonight when they take on the Memphis Grizzlies at the Wachovia Center. At 15-44, the Grizzlies are one of only two teams in the NBA to have a worse record than the Sixers (20-38).

But don't think this will be easy, especially after the Sixers achieved maybe their best moment of the season two nights ago with a 99-94 win over the high-powered Phoenix Suns, one of the league's elite teams.

The Sixers are smart enough to know that the L-word - letdown - is absolutely in play here.

"I certainly talked about it this morning," coach Maurice Cheeks said yesterday after the Sixers held a short practice at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. "That was an easy game to get ready to play. It was the Phoenix Suns. They had a lot at stake, and we knew they were going to be ready to play."

The Memphis game, he said, "is going to be a little different, totally opposite. With Phoenix, their record indicates their being one of the better teams, and Memphis is on the other side of the coin. So we're just trying to stay consistent. . . . It's not about playing a great game against the Phoenix Suns and then turning around and having a letdown against Memphis."

"You've got to stick to the game plan and not get off-focus," said Andre Iguodala, the team's top scorer. "That tends to happen sometimes with a young team. You get a big win and you tend to relax, thinking that the next game is a guaranteed win. Well, it's not in the NBA. We've got to go in thinking that Memphis will give us a good game and we've got to play our best ball."

The Grizzlies shocked the Sixers on Jan. 17 in Memphis, racing to a 25-point second-quarter lead and cruising to a 118-102 win. Iguodala scored a season-low four points.

"They really blitzed us pretty hard," guard Willie Green said. "They beat us bad. We remember that loss. We know we're definitely capable of performing way better than when we played in Memphis. They beat up on us and we've just got to come in and redeem ourselves."

The Sixers' three-game winning streak came in their first three games of the season in November, when Allen Iverson and Chris Webber were on the roster and happy. Since then, they've won back-to-back games three times but have failed to take the next one, with two of the three losses coming at home.

Iguodala said matching the run would be nice.

"I'm definitely looking forward to that, starting a new streak," he said. "We've had two good games and played well. We've just got to continue to do it."

Notes. Results of an MRI taken yesterday showed that rookie forward Rodney Carney has a tear of the rotator cuff and labrum (cartilage) in his right shoulder. A specialist who examined the shoulder, Gerry Williams, said surgery was unnecessary. The team listed Carney's status as day-to-day. . . . Kyle Korver said the announcement of the winning entry in his search to find a logo for his foundation had been delayed from tonight until Wednesday because of the high number of submissions. Some 280 logo designs have been entered from 18 states and several foreign countries.