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Two-time All-Star Elton Brand, World Championship gold medal winner Andre Iguodala, an up and coming point guard in Jrue Holiday, some solid veterans and a host of promising young players all added up to zero expectations for Philadelphia at the start of this season.  After last year’s debacle, most experts put the 76ers back among the Eastern Conference’s lottery hopefuls again.

The Sixers did little to dispel the experts’ preseason pronouncements as new head coach Doug Collins led his team to a 3-13 record into late November.

"I put up on the board earlier in the year that we were 0-6 against Toronto, Cleveland, and Washington," said Collins.  

Fortunately for Collins and the Sixers, things were about to change.  Since the 0-3 road trip at the end of November, Philadelphia has a respectable 18-13 record.

"A lot of it is everyone is getting acclimated to each other," said Collins.  "Early in the year I took over the team and I thought from looking at the outside in that there were certain things that we were going to be able to do and I scraped a lot of the stuff that we were doing early and tried to come across a formula that would help us play the way we could play best.

"We are such a different team now.  

"We have had guys with a lot of internal growth.  Jrue has gotten better as the season has gone on.  Lou Williams and Thad (Young) have been shining off the bench for us.  We have played 12 games without Dre (Iguodala) and we were able to stay above water in that stretch, especially in that one stretch when on the West coast, we went eight games on the road and we were able to fight through that.  Elton Brand has been steady, as steady as can be the entire year, 15 points and eight rebounds every single night and our guys are growing.  Jodie Meeks gives us a nice spark, Evan (Turner) has gotten a lot better.  

"Its internal growth just like I knew it was going to have to be because we are very young."

The 76ers basketball operations President Rod Thorn explained the change in his team to Dei Lynam of CSNPhilly.com:

"If you ask coaches around the league of teams that play us they will tell you that Philadelphia has an identity," Thorn said. "We didn’t have an identity before, but we have an identity now."

An identity for a sports team is not always the easiest thing to define and its existence can often come down to winning or losing.

"It’s interesting," said Iguodala.  "When you are losing you are kind of lost, but when you are winning, you just found an identity.  Things are just coming together for us.  Basketball is basketball and we are finding ways to string some wins together.

"We got a young team and guys are just learning how to play basketball the right way and when you play the right way and play hard with a little bit of talent mixed in there you are going to see some results.

"The coach has found what lineups to put in for certain situations and learned from experience."

Iguodala makes a point; the Sixers have been creating something not there earlier this season or in the recent past.

"There were a lot of new pieces this year," said the Sixers’ new starting center Spencer Hawes.  "We are figuring out how to play together and there was a change in the system and the culture and it takes time and doesn’t happen overnight.

"Once you find it you have to try and make it consistent and both individually and as a team and come out every night and strive to have that as an ideal and fall back on that."

{AUTHOR_BOX}The consistency Hawes describes is the essence of a team’s identity, something players expect from themselves and their opponents expect to see every time they step on the floor.

"Our identity is we play hard every night and never quit," said veteran Andres Nocioni.  "That is the way that we play.  We try to play good defense, run the floor, and never quit.  We always play hard and we are always close.  Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose but we are always close.

"It comes from the players and the coach too.  It is a challenge.  We play together.  The coach is the way we like to play.  He likes to play hard and bring energy to every game and the players try to do the same thing."

Finally alone in seventh place in the East with 35 games left in the season, Collins has almost as many wins as the team’s previous coach Eddie Jordan did all of last season.  The Sixers are playing harder than before his arrival, and playing hard every night is an identity any team would be proud to own.

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