"Doug Collins made it sound simple enough. He's good at that sort of thing, taking the abstract and the intricate and distilling it until the answer is smooth enough for everyone to consume.

Before the game, someone asked Collins if this mini, three-game stretch in the Sixers' schedule seems particularly daunting. It was a fair question. The Sixers fell to Denver on Wednesday in their first home loss of the season. Atlanta came to town on Friday night. And on Saturday, the Sixers travel to Miami to play a team that just smacked the Lakers around even though Dwyane Wade wasn't on the court. So: Nuggets, Hawks, Heat. Not so easy, eh?

"I think every night is a test," Collins said. "I don't ever look at who we're playing. I really don't. If we're playing well, we can play with anybody in the league and if we're not we can lose to anybody in the league."

His prescience is alarming. When he's finally done with basketball, Collins and Malik Rose – a man who's fond of professing his own Nostradamus-like powers of prediction – should start a traveling sideshow and go from town to town to forecast the future.

On Friday evening, the Sixers had a dreadful first half. They turned the ball over eight times – a Collins no-no – and allowed Atlanta to shoot 50 percent from the floor, which should have been impossible even if the Hawks were on the court all alone. The Sixers were not playing well, not at all, and, as Collins said, they looked like they could lose to anybody in the league – especially the Hawks."