<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">The day after one of the most memorable 76ers losses of this or any season, Maurice Cheeks still could manage a smile, even if it was a weary one. "After games like that, what happens is you don't want to go to sleep because if you close your eyes, you replay it all over again," Cheeks said yesterday after putting his Sixers through a short practice at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. The Sixers' fall-from-ahead 88-85 home loss Wednesday night to the Milwaukee Bucks happened in a number of ways, from lost rebounds to quick shots to mental mistakes and, ultimately, the inability of the team to score in the final 2 minutes, 56 seconds. There were mistakes that would have embarrassed a college team, much less a team in the top third of the NBA payroll chart. But Cheeks, who wanted to assume a significant part of the blame for the defeat, saying he needed to teach certain situations better, did not back off yesterday. "If it happens, I think you have to teach it," he said. "I don't think you can take it for granted. I think you have to reenact those situations and go over those things and talk about them. That's exactly what we did, go over them so those things don't happen again." The Sixers' fourth loss in a row dropped them from first to third place in the Atlantic Division. They get a chance to erase the bad taste of the Bucks debacle tonight when they take on the Charlotte Bobcats at the Wachovia Center. The good news is that the Bobcats are 1-10 on the road. The bad news is that the one win away from Charlotte came against the Sixers on Nov. 4, a 110-93 pasting. Right now, the Sixers carry a mentality that can best be described as fragile. In two of the last three games, they have been unable to score down the stretch and turned certain victories into crushing defeats. For his part, maybe because he feels a need to publicly show faith in his team, Cheeks said he doesn't fear a loss of confidence. "That is my job, to try to get them to believe that they can get into a situation where they can win games," he said. "Like I told them, it will happen. You just have to keep your faith, believe that you can win those games and do it and not play to go out there and lose. "Come on, those things that happened [Wednesday] night, they happened in a row. Six months from now, when you look at that, it will be comical to look at that game the way it happened. You could not write a script like that. You cannot write the things that happened in a row like that to lose a game."</div> Source
