The Allen Iverson Situation as of August 2, 2009
Anyone who has ever had doubts about the legitimacy of basketball, due for example to perceived inconsistent foul calling from game to game, puts some of that aside when a player like Allen Iverson comes along. Iverson has always, just as he claims, "Played every game as if it’s his last". Iverson goes out there and fights for every game regardless of whether the referees are doing so.
So as a perfectionist you can say that basketball is not perfect or even close to perfect due to inconsistent foul calling, but as a human you have to like and respect basketball due to players such as Allen Iverson.
Now here we are 13 years after Iverson came into the NBA and just a few short years before he is inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame yet the "what have you done for me lately" crowd has joined the Iverson haters crowd in trying to ransack Iverson's rep.
This is really a dumb thing to do, although I guess you can get away with it at the moment because you never know, Iverson might commit a horrible crime and never be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Or the world might end before he can be in the Hall of Fame.
Seriously though, Quest has proven that Iverson's main problem is that he has been playing the wrong position for most of his 13 NBA seasons. To oversimplify and make a long story short, Iverson's tendencies to take too many shots was made worse when Larry Brown switched him from 1-Guard (Point Guard) to 2-Guard about 11 years ago. Ever since then, fools have been, either literally or more commonly in effect, criticizing Iverson for not being a good Point Guard when he has not been assigned the position.
Here is a post I made on an Iverson-hating forum back in March.
(Note, although in the fall of 2008 I promised I wouldn't do it any more, this past spring I was again guilty of posting on forums without posting here at the same time. During August, I will be digging that material up and posting it here. I have reissued my pledge not to do that anymore and this time, the rules have real teeth.)
On Iverson at the Iverson-hating forum, March 2009:
Over and over again at this forum there is the logical inconsistency of everyone blaming losses of Nuggets games last year and Pistons games this year on Iverson not being a good point guard (PG) yet Iverson has not been assigned the position for most of his NBA career. Believe it or not, on the full scale Pistons forum, the Pistons' unexpected losses this year are mostly not blamed on Iverson, because on that forum, it is understood that Stuckey is the designated point guard backed up by Will Bynum and Arron Afflalo. Whereas Iverson is a 2-guard, along with Rip.
It's basically just as goofy to blame Iverson for any Pistons PG problems as it would be to blame Rip Hamilton. I know for a fact that few here support the idea of Iverson being designated the PG, so for anyone who does not support AI to be designated PG to blame him for not being a good PG when he is not designated that is, to repeat, goofy.
During February, the Pistons were 3-9. If you visit this topic, you can see that one of the big and probably the biggest reason for that was that Stuckey fell off a cliff and ended up on the border between poor and very poor. Stuckey was the PG problem for the Pistons during the big losing streak, Iverson had almost nothing to do with it, unless you want to argue that Iverson should be the PG and was crowding out Stuckey. In that case, it would be the fault of Iverson coaches, not the fault of Iverson himself.
An experienced coach would have played Will Bynum more and Stuckey less during Stuckey's huge slump, but that did not happen, which cost the Pistons at least a couple of February wins.
During February, Iverson was leading the Pistons and was a little distance into the star range.
So, laugh out loud how Iverson gets blamed for everything on this board and yet, how much do you want to bet that few if any Iverson haters will subscribe to the theory that the underlying problem is that Iverson has been playing the wrong position for many years.
Fast forward to now, and we have Oly Sander, one of only three pro basketball writers I have discovered so far (out of dozens) who I think are good enough to warrant continually checking out. The other day Sander came up with five possible reasons why free agent Iverson has not been picked up quickly by another team, in other words, as he says, "Why Iverson is not the Answer".
How cute by the way, I wish I could think of cute expressions like that sometimes. So let's check out his five theories and see if there is anything to them.
1.Iverson is no longer a star. Last season’s debacle in Detroit proved he’s more a blending player; an off-the bench scorer or complimentary piece. Problem is Iverson doesn’t share this sentiment and wants first option minutes, touches, and shots.
No, this is wrong. Iverson is still a star. He would make a good starter for at least 20 teams. It is correct to say though that he apparently is not a superstar anymore, which would be no surprise if he has been playing the wrong position for the better part of 13 years.
With regard to the starting thing, on the one hand, it’s true that Iverson wants to start and will play for the Grizzlies or Clippers to get to do so. How many Hall of Fame players are happy to come off the bench and play 10 or 15 minutes during their last few years, and how many would rather just retire and save themselves that? Either choice is correct; if Iverson can't start anywhere and he can't accept that, then he should retire, and there would be nothing wrong with that decision if that's how it played out.
Ok, #1 is wrong. Let's go to #2:
2. Money matters. Iverson wants decent dollars because he equates his contract with respect. For instance, he believes taking the veteran’s minimum means he’s a journeyman. This is incorrect. There’s nothing wrong with taking less for the right situation, especially when you’ve had two’ max’ contracts.
Not much to say here because there isn't much here that could explain the Iverson mess. Iverson is a millionaire; he doesn't need any more money. He quit the 2009 Pistons when they became the most depressing team in the NBA thanks to GM Joe Dumars, fired Coach Michael Curry, the gross inconsistency of PG Rodney Stuckey, and the decisions of Rasheed Wallace and apparently Tayshaun Prince to pack it in rather than to continue to compete all out.
So #2 is much more wrong than right. Let's proceed to #3:
3. Unfortunately, playing time and money are scarce for this year’s free agent crop. Coaches don’t have to guarantee minutes or roles and GMs don’t have to back-up the brinks trucks or give out extended terms. Iverson’s demands are unrealistic in the current market.
Um, playing time is not affected by a recession or a depression. Thank goodness the NBA doesn't reduce games to 40 minutes for the recession, they are already too short already, laugh out loud.
Money is not scarce either. The salary cap, which is close to 60 million dollars per team, has been reduced by a grand total of about one million dollars, which hardly means money is scarce. Why should Iverson be the one player who takes a huge cut in pay just because of the recession/depression caused by, oh, I better not get into that. This is another dream of the Iverson haters, that Iverson play for the pay of the average basketball player.
I don't know exactly what Iverson's demands are, but if he would rather get something in between a minimum and a maximum contract and start for a team like the Grizzlies rather than get a minimum veteran contract and come off the bench for a much better team, that is his choice. I'd say in fact that the Grizzlies thing would be the better choice, since Iverson's ability to help win a Championship has been impaired by his playing the wrong position for many of his 13 NBA years.
OK, so #3 is wrong. Whew, we are starting to run out of possibilities. Let's keep our fingers crossed and move on to #4:
4. Last year in Detroit was a disaster. When healthy, he struggled. His tendency to dominate the ball didn`t jive with the collectivist Pistons and led to GM Joe Dumars giving him the golden handshake to stay on the injured list. Other teams are leery of adding such a situation.
Notice that the writer goes from "Detroit was a disaster" to "He struggled". This is a clever way to get the reader to think that Iverson was the cause of the Detroit disaster without saying it. In other words, this is a way for the writer to stay on the good side of the large number of Iverson haters out there, without making a statement that could easily be proven incorrect, and that would look goofy to anyone who knows, for example, that most of the starting Pistons played worse in 2008-09 than they did the year before, and who knows that the Coach has been fired for incompetence, and, well, you get the point.
Very clever, he wants to have it both ways: he wants to be friends with both the Iverson haters and with those who look at the forest instead of just the trees. So this is just the writer trying to be friends with just about everybody at the same time.
For the record, there is no evidence that Joe Dumars conspired to make sure Iverson would not play in the latter part of the season. I mean, I just wrote a Report on how Dumars has seriously messed up the Pistons, but forbidding Iverson to play using a false injury routine was NOT one of Dumars' mistakes.
The most likely thing that happened is that Iverson essentially quit the Pistons. I mean, he was quoted just before he stopped playing for them that he didn't want to play in a limited off the bench role (less than 20 minutes per game). It would be kind of odd if that statement was not related to him subsequently not playing for them, don't you think?
So this reason is all goofy and doesn't hold any water.
Now its nail biting time, because we are down to just one possibility left, reason #5:
5. When convenient, the NBA has used hip hop as a marketing tool. When inconvenient, the NBA has shamefully distanced itself from anything hip hop. Right now, is one of those distancing times, so Iverson, the original face of Slam Mag`, isn`t a marketing draw.
Oh my God, a cultural / economics point. You seldom see this type of thing anywhere but at Quest.
Well, I had my fingers crossed, but this one is not correct either. First, Iverson himself is a lot less hip-hop than he was years ago. He even got rid of his corn rows this past season, a hair style closely associated with the hip hop community. So just as the NBA has become less hip hop than it was roughly a decade ago, Iverson has as well.
As to whether Iverson is not a marketing draw, that's actually true for some markets. For example, the Denver Nuggets traded for Iverson not because they were serious about winning a Championship, but because the owner and/or his advisors thought that Iverson would make him and his franchise some good money. But Denver was never a hip-hop town, and hip-hop was nationally going through a relative stagnation at that time, so the Nuggets ended up with neither a Championship appearance nor any extra money due to Iverson to speak of.
On the other hand, Memphis and Los Angeles, the former due more to intensity and the latter due more to sheer population, are still major hip hop markets, so Iverson playing for either the Grizzlies or the Clippers would make them a substantial chunk of money they would not get otherwise.
Damn, all five reasons come up lacking. The Quest for the Ring theory remains the only good one. Let me spell it out: Iverson is not wanted by hardly anyone because he has been playing the wrong position for most of his 13 years in the NBA. He is a point guard who needs to be reminded all the time to share the ball. In other words, he has been coached incorrectly for many of the years, with Larry Brown being the worst offender.
If you were a manager, would you want a player who has been playing the wrong position for most of his career? No, you wouldn't.
The bottom line is that Oly Sander is one of the very best pro basketball writers out there, and I agree with a lot of what he writes. But he is at least as much in the dark about Iverson as are the Iverson haters, maybe more so actually.
And now you see why Quest has spent so much time on the Iverson thing and why we will be completing the Special Report series and continuing to follow the Iverson saga? Because the vast majority do not understand what is going on, but we do.
