Bob Ford: Collins begins task of fixing the 76ers

The 76ers completed the invisible portion of what promises to be a difficult transition season with one final practice on Tuesday, and if they fully knew what lies ahead it didn't show as they joked and took their last shots of the afternoon.

Starting with the opener against the Miami Heat, the NBA's shrine to player vanity, the Sixers will come out of the shadows and what happens next might not be very pretty.

"You can't get discouraged," coach Doug Collins said. "You've just got to add them up at the end."

Unfortunately, that probably won't take long, but the organization isn't kidding itself this time. The team has a crazy quilt of a roster, all mismatched pieces, and the biggest job of Collins and his staff this season is to figure out which swatches of basketball talent are worth keeping. Along the way, it would be nice to win some games, but this group will probably struggle to match last season's 27-55 record.

"We're trying to restore pride and dignity to this organization and sometimes bricks are being laid, and you might not see the results immediately," Collins said. "I have never worked harder than I have in the last 30 days, but there are no tangible results now. I have to ask our assistant coaches, 'Are we getting better? Are we making progress?' As a coach, you just see all the things you're trying to correct."

The toughest part for a coach, especially one with the hyperactive teaching gifts of Collins, is that some failings aren't correctable. When he spoke of laying bricks, he meant the team is, hopefully, building a solid foundation for the future. But the dual meaning for this particular team is that it has great difficulty throwing the rubber ball through the iron rim, which is not a skill usually acquired at the NBA level.

The Sixers are such a poor shooting team, in fact, that Collins intends to start small forward Jason Kapono in the opener just to give the team a hint of a perimeter threat. Kapono is the best shooter on the roster, but he is not the best defender, to be kind.

"You lose some ball pressure . . . and he'll have to do his best to not get broken down off the dribble," Collins said. "But I've played with the pieces all this fall, and we have to have somebody out there who can make a shot. We just have to."

Kapono will be in the frontcourt with power forward Elton Brand and center Spencer Hawes, and point guard Jrue Holiday and shooting guard Andre Iguodala will start in the backcourt.

"This is the best mix of guys to start games right now," Collins said.

In other words: Oh, my.

Again, this is a process, and somewhere down the road, the hope is that rookie guard Evan Turner learns to play without the ball in his hands, and that he starts shooting better. The hope is that Thaddeus Young, who took a huge step backward last season, can accept coming off the bench and being shuttled between the two forward positions. The hope is that Hawes isn't as clunky as he looked in the exhibition season. The hope is that collectively the defense improves so that Iguodala doesn't have to be on the floor for that skill alone. (The starting shooting guard has a sprained right wrist and hasn't taken a shot in practice since last week, but no one seems to think this is odd.)

Well, there are a lot of things the organization hopes might happen this season, but unlike a year ago, the only jobs on the line are the ones in uniform. It was easy to blame the previous disaster on coach Eddie Jordan and his magical motion offense that was neither suited to the team nor absorbed by the skeptical players. And it was easy for ownership to, at least partially, blame general manager Eddie Stefanski for the dysfunctional roster.

The organization has gotten past that stage of grief and realized the magnitude of the disaster. Now the task, under Collins and new team president Rod Thorn, is to fix it, however long that might take.

"We've got a ways to go," Collins said. "That's why they asked me to come in here and teach and help figure out what we've got."

Truthfully, they have no idea. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because it means the organization can judge the players with a fresh eye, as if all of them are in their first years on the team. If Collins can keep them from quitting as the losses pile up, as they did a year ago, that would be a bonus, too.

"There are going to be difficult times, as much for me," Collins said. "I've talked to Rod and Eddie about it. You expect things to change immediately sometimes, and that's not going to happen. These guys have worked hard, but if they don't see early results, are they going to be willing to keep chipping away at that rock? You have to keep believing you could be just one game away from something good happening."

The fear, however, at least in this season of lowered expectations, is that the Sixers will always be one game away from something good.