Sixers' season of 'ups and downs'

BOSTON - Before this season started, "evaluate" was the word used most frequently by Sixers president Rod Thorn and coach Doug Collins. While both were hoping for many wins and the positives they bring an organization, they were also looking to the future, and determining which players would fit into their plans.

After winning 18 of the first 25 games, the questions of what had to be done to improve this team during the offseason were swept under the rug for the most part. But now, as the team fights to keep a spot in the playoff race at 29-27, those questions are on the top of people's minds.

So when do you get a better read of this team: When it was smoking hot in the first 25 games, or now, when the fan is being hit by much you-know-what?

"That's a great question," Thorn said before Sunday's 103-79 loss to the Celtics. "What you try is [to] look at the overall picture. For us, there have been ups and downs. I think you have to look at the overall picture, not when things are going really well and not when they're going poorly. Now we've been around guys for a couple of years. I think we have a good feel for whatever the talent level is and how they're put together mentally, also. It's something that you evaluate during the course of time and not make precipitated judgments about people. We've tried a different lineup for quite a while now to see how that would work. You can evaluate at the end of the season. So we'll see.

"Any time when the season's over, you try to be as dispassionate as you can and try to figure out exactly what you need and what you can try to get. Obviously, we still have [10] games to go here and see what transpires the rest of the season. Hopefully we'll have some playoff games along with it, but we're going to have to play well in order to do that. When the season's over, you look at your whole structure, where you are and what you have. We have some free agents to start out with, some unrestricted free agents, so we've got some work to do, no doubt about it."

What exactly has happened to this team to cause such a downfall is as mysterious to Thorn as to any outsider looking in.

"We just haven't played as well lately," he said. "For a couple of weeks' period we weren't great defensively and we never have been a very good offensive team and that's continued. We just haven't played as well."

After Saturday's 88-82 loss to Orlando, Doug Collins spoke of perhaps making changes in the starting lineup. Orlando had jumped out to a 12-2 lead, continuing a troubling pattern of slow starts for the Sixers.

"We have three guys [Jrue Holiday, Evan Turner and Andre Iguodala] on the perimeter who all have a tendency to want to come back and get the ball," Collins said. "We've talked about if Evan or Dre rebound the ball, we want them to push. If our bigs rebound it, we want Jrue to get the ball and we want them to run. Evan thinks like a point guard and so his tendency is to come back and get the ball and he's not an instinctive runner. We haven't shot the ball well. We had a horrible start shooting the ball [Saturday], both in the first and third quarters. We're just not in a great rhythm. Nothing is coming easy.

"If we can't get this going with this group, we're going to have to change. My tendency was to try to keep it the same the whole season but we've got to start finding some rhythm. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I hope I don't have to do that. I thought we got off to a great start in Miami, we got out and ran and there was great rhythm in the first half. Then we came out in the third quarter [Saturday] and were just totally out of rhythm. We've got to find a way to score. Our defense is good enough. We're struggling to score."

Sunday against Boston, the Sixers started OK, trailing by just 25-22 after the first period, but a 2-for-14 shooting drought in the second doomed them.

Doug Collins is your typical "old-time basketball" person. Running through a wall wasn't questioned in his day. Now, he feels, the game and its players are different.

"Younger players are still carving their niche, finding out who they are," Collins said. "As a coach, piecing that together is a very delicate thing. The one thing about players today is that they're very sensitive and very fragile. They didn't grow up with tough coaches. I had my ass kicked since I was 6. It's a different time. I treat this team very much with kid gloves, I really do. And I'm still looked at as an ogre. It's terrible. I find myself during the games looking at a coach and saying, 'Was I all right during that timeout? Did I hurt anybody's feelings? Was I OK?' That's the sensitivity, and the younger the guys the more sensitive. That's what you're wrestling with.

"Teaching during practice is very unemotional. What happens is when you get into a game it is emotional and sometimes when you're teaching it comes across in a different way because the game's on the line. So that teaching setting has been lost this year and a lot of our players have really been hurt by that. We have a really young group of guys. And so what I think I do best, and I've always had very young teams, the one thing I've prided myself on is getting them better and getting guys better. We've missed that this year. It's been a real tough time and it's been a part of the job that I've really missed this year.

"Coaching games to me is one thing, but being on the floor and teaching, to me, is when I can really get my hands around these guys and teach them the game I love. And we haven't had much time to do that this year."