Bob Ford | 76ers bank on work ethic, patience

The 76ers greet the first season of the rest of their lives tonight in Toronto and management kindly requests that the team's progress not be judged solely on the pesky accounting of its won-lost record.

In other words, uh-oh.

"We're not going to promise anything to fans, but we're going to play hard and make them proud of how we play on the court," team president Billy King said.

Those are noble aspirations and high ideals, but history suggests they don't often fill seats in the NBA - particularly not at 75 bucks a pop. The Sixers know this, but they haven't got much else to sell. Therefore, the emphasis will be on giving an honest effort and the faint hope that these gawky transition years will somehow produce a swan at the end.

It has worked that way before, when the Sixers stumbled away from the Charles Barkley era and searched in the wilderness for what would become the Allen Iverson era. After Barkley's exit, the team won an average of 23 games for the next five seasons, including Iverson's rookie year, before Larry Brown arrived and provided some traction for the spinning wheels.

Things were so down in Sixerland that despite moving into a new arena and having the No. 1 pick in the draft, attendance decreased in Iverson's first season. A tough trifecta, but they hit it.

So these fallow periods are nothing new and nothing necessarily permanent. They aren't that much fun to watch, though. Maybe this won't be as bad as enduring John Lucas instructing Sharone Wright and Willie Burton, but we'll have to wait and see.

King, for his part, preaches that patience is definitely a good thing. He will soon have a pocket full of salary-cap money to spend on the missing pieces, with this season dedicated to determining which pieces are missing.

And hustle, of course. Did we mention hustle?

"Allen was here the year before we [King and Brown] got here, and he scored a lot of points, but there weren't a lot of people coming," King said. "But as we built a team, Eric Snow developed his own name, and George Lynch and Theo Ratliff. They weren't household names, but people got excited about the way they played."