Hinkie tries to stay the course

HOUSTON - He was sitting courtside in the Toyota Center on Thursday night, the tipoff of the 76ers' 26th straight loss still 90 minutes away, and Sam Hinkie was in no mood to contemplate the monster he'd created.

The criticism, the jokes, the pure ridicule had been seeping into his consciousness for a while. He has been aware of it. He couldn't help but be. He had become, in so many minds, a laughingstock - a first-year general manager who, in trying to build for the future, had begun by compiling a roster of players so inexperienced, so overmatched that they may not win another game this season.

Thursday night would be the punctuation to it all. Thursday night was history.

And so history happened here as everyone expected it would, with a lopsided Rockets victory, 120-98, in an arena that was half-empty at the game's start. ("People tend to come late here," a regular attendee said. "I don't know if they'll come tonight . . .") Dwight Howard swatted away a feathery Thaddeus Young finger-roll at one end of the court and threw down a thunderclap dunk at the other. James Harden dribbled anywhere and passed to anyone and took whatever shot he cared to take. The game featured all the predictably ugly moments that are supposed to lead to something beautiful someday for the Sixers.

The streak is at 26, matching the longest of any franchise among the four major professional leagues. Another loss Saturday to the Detroit Pistons at the Wells Fargo Center, and the Sixers will have the ignominy all to themselves. If the streak stretches to the season's end, to 36 straight . . . mercy, the mocking that will follow.

Hinkie declined to discuss the streak in any depth, but Thursday's setting was a fine reminder of why his reading too much into the here and now could cause him to lose sight of his long-term goal. During the 2007-08 season, when Hinkie was their vice president of player personnel, the Rockets ripped off 22 wins in a row. They won 10 consecutive games ahead of that year's trade deadline, dealt their sixth man, Bonzi Wells, to New Orleans for the sake of more salary-cap flexibility the following season, then won 12 straight after the deadline.

"It was good for our fans and enjoyable for our players," he said. "Think of the corollary."

The implication was obvious: The fun of the winning streak was fleeting - just as the misery of this losing streak will be, too - and the Rockets still had a long way to go to maintain any staying power as an elite franchise. They had even further to go once Yao Ming broke his left foot during the 2009 postseason, once his rise to superstardom stopped. Hinkie was in an office here when the Rockets learned of the severity of Yao's injury, and the entire organization understood: It didn't matter that the Rockets had beaten the Trail Blazers in the first round and taken the Lakers to seven games in the second. They had to start over.

"From that moment on, we tried to fix it," Hinkie said. "Since that moment, the most interesting topic in the world to me is how to go from zero stars to one. It was the most important challenge available in my last job and in this one. The game is star-driven. Get one."

Hinkie's belief in his plan remains as strong as it was at his introductory news conference last year, when he told the world what he would be doing and how he would be doing it. It's just so hard to see the outline and promise of that plan now, amid all these lopsided losses and shot-in-the-dark signings. As Hinkie sat there, he watched his most recent acquisition - Casper Ware, a 5-foot-10, 175-pound, doe-eyed guard - scoot around the three-point arc, firing jumper after jumper.

Ware had been playing for Virtus Bologna, a team in the Italian League, when his agent, Kevin Bradbury, surprised him with a phone call last week: He might have a chance to play in the NBA. Ware had been plopped in front of his TV in his apartment in Italy when the call came, so stunned by the news that by Thursday he could no longer remember what he'd been watching.

Bradbury did not tell him which NBA team was interested in him. There was no need to clutter the kid's excited mind, and Ware was indeed excited, and not merely because his lifelong dream might come true. Virtus Bologna had lost nine of its previous 12 games. It would be nice to win a few more games again. Then Bradbury told him which team wanted to sign him.

"You just go out and play," Ware said. "You can't think about it."

That seems the best advice for everyone affiliated with the Sixers: their management, their players, their fans, their general manager. It's their only recourse, really. You let history happen, and then you do all you can to move forward and to keep it there, deep in the distance.