Collins' Sixers still striving, growing

In an odd bit of scheduling coincidence, the NBA named Doug Collins of the 76ers and Rick Carlisle of the Dallas Mavericks as February coaches of the month for their respective conferences Tuesday afternoon. A couple of hours later, Collins and Carlisle sent out their teams at the Wells Fargo Center to see which of them would take the early lead for March.

Recent Sixers coaches haven't won very many honors. There have been some coaches who barely seemed to last a month, or lasted only that long before their inevitable failure became apparent. Larry Brown was the most recent coach-of-the-month selection, and that came in March 2003. So, it's been a while.

The Sixers closed out February with four straight wins over teams with losing records and then turned the page of the calendar on Tuesday to find an opponent worth being measured against. Dallas came into the game with the third-best record in the NBA and one of the best road records in the league.

No single game in the regular season is a real statement game, but going up against the Mavericks was at least that sort of a measurement game. How far have they come? How far do they have to go? Can they really play in the thin air occupied by a talented team like Dallas?

The answer that arrived in the 101-93 loss wasn't entirely conclusive. The Sixers fell behind by 10 in the first half, but scrapped back and made it a game down the stretch. Once there, however, the Mavericks were having none of it and, frankly, the Sixers didn't play well enough to deserve the game.

"What we saw was their big-game experience, their playoff experience, and it trumped our effort tonight," Collins said. "We went toe-to-toe with a team that is playing as well as any team in the NBA, and we were one possession from taking the lead. But we talk about executing under pressure, and our guys are doing this for the first time. That team has done it a lot. . . . There's nothing like the experience."

In the fourth quarter with the game on the line, the Sixers made some bad decisions, bricked some free throws, and kept losing track of shooter Jason Terry, who bombed in 30 points for the Mavs. Any of those oversights might have cost the game, but taken together, the mistakes sealed the outcome.

"I told the guys I was incredibly proud of their effort," Collins said, "but those are the kind of teams right now we have a difficult time beating."

Collins has done what he can to speed the learning process this season and the Sixers have come further than anyone expected in so short a time. It is March and the team has a .500 record. Considering how the Sixers started, that's remarkable.

Carlisle, like everyone else in the league, has taken note of the strides made by the Sixers this season and he knows the key to the improvement.

"The key was hiring Doug Collins. He's had a massive effect here," Carlisle said. "It's been a total culture change. Last year, it was an undisciplined team at both ends of the court. This year, after a very difficult schedule and a difficult start, it's now one of the best teams in basketball. It's a team that I don't think anybody in the East wants to play in the playoffs."

It's true that the Sixers are annoying to play. They defend. They run. They rebound. They work for each other. Of course, that's also what they have to do. There is a name for a team with this collection of talent that doesn't do the work and doesn't care: the 2009-2010 Sixers.

This season, the parts are essentially the same, but the sum of the parts has been different. Collins gets credit for that, but the hardest part of his job - elevating the team to the next level without a true superstar - is still to come.

"They've experienced quantum growth in the last three months, and as they play more games together and the intensity grows down the stretch, there is the potential for more growth," Carlisle said. "As the games get more important and they keep moving in the same direction, they'll be peaking at the right time."

It could go that way. Or it could be that as the games become more intense and important, there will be more fourth quarters like the one against the Mavs. As Collins said, it's all part of the learning experience, and there's no guarantee the experience will be easy to watch.

That's the coach's job, though, to make sure there is learning to accompany the losses. Collins does that part as well as anyone, letting his players know what they have to do to get where they want to go. And every now and then, it is instructive to have a team like the Dallas Mavericks come by to let them know how it will look when they get there.