Sixers come back to life, smothering Bobcats early

The 76ers tried their best last night to erase the bad taste of lackluster play in their previous two games, and pulled it off despite playing two quite different halves.

The Sixers followed a season-high 69-point first half with erratic basketball in the second, but found the effort to be there for most of the 48 minutes in a 106-97 victory over the Charlotte Bobcats in front of 17,104 fans at the Wachovia Center.

The Sixers showed a lot more life, even without the injured Andre Iguodala, who missed the first game of his professional career with a lower-back strain, than they did in defeats by 50 points at home against Houston and 21 points at Detroit in their previous two contests.

They led the entire game. They shot 81.0 percent in the first quarter (17 of 21) to jump out to a 14-point lead, and prevailed by 21 at the half with the help of 17 assists, or only three fewer than they had in the two previous games combined.

OK, so the second half wasn't great, with 13 turnovers and only 37 points scored. But the Sixers will take it, only their second win in their last six games but the ninth in their last 11 at home.

"We talked about getting rid of those two games," Sixers coach Maurice Cheeks said, "and just focus in on this game here and getting back to playing the way we had played before those two games. We had been playing spirited defense, passing the ball, accumulating a lot of assists, and tonight was the way we had played prior to the last two."

Kyle Korver, who came off the bench for 13 points, was one of seven Sixers in double figures. He said his team's performance in the first half "was able to pull us through the game."

"The effort should always be there," he said. "I thought the last couple of games, [opponents] kind of jumped on us early and maybe we hung our heads a little bit, and it just snowballed on us into really bad losses. But tonight we came out from the start and played really hard and really smart basketball in the first half."

The Bobcats, who were missing two injured big men, Emeka Okafor (strained calf) and Scott May (sore right knee), went to a smaller lineup in the third quarter and cut into the deficit but were never able to get the gap below 10 until 2 minutes, 9 seconds remained.

The Sixers answered Charlotte's small lineup with a three-guard offense of Andre Miller, Willie Green and Kevin Ollie, and the trio played the entire fourth quarter.

Ollie, who had been sitting recently because Cheeks wants to play second-year man Louis Williams as the backup point guard, contributed five points, three rebounds, two assists, a steal, and a blocked shot in the fourth quarter alone.

"I thought Kevin Ollie was huge," Cheeks said. "I thought his presence out on the floor - guarding the ball, making some passes, and making some plays - was huge for us."

"I just come in and do what I do," Ollie said. "What I do is play defense. If some shots go in, that's good. But I just go in there and try to keep people in front of me."

Miller led the Sixers with 19 points and nine assists, and Green added 18 points.

The Sixers wound up shooting 55.1 percent from the field, compared with 35.7 percent in their previous two games. They finished with 27 assists, one off their season best.

Everyone tried to contribute offensively in the absence of Iguodala, whose streak of 232 consecutive starts - or every game since he joined the Sixers out of Arizona in 2004 - ended.

Iguodala called his idleness "strange" and "not something I want to get used to."

Iguodala departed with the team on the charter flight to Miami for tonight's game against the Heat. He was concerned about the effect the two-plus-hour flight would have on his back but said he wanted to play tonight.