The Question on The Answer

Let's take a second and reflect on something absolutely ridiculous occurring in the NBA right now, Allen Iverson is not on an NBA team. This is an outrageous, tragic, and extremely disrespectful to one of the best players that has ever picked up a rock. This Legend, two years removed from being the third leading scorer in the NBA, ninth in assists, and fourth in steals is now suddenly abhorred while names like like cancerous, poisonous and chemistry killer have been casted at him like stones. We're talking about one of the fifty greatest of all time who is abruptly "washed up". How did this happen? Let's take a look at the trade between Denver and Detroit that's threatening to push Iverson into early retirement.

For some reason Iverson became the scapegoat for Detroit's downfall and Denver's rise to prosperity in the mighty West. Unfortunately these media know it alls and Iverson detractors fail to recognize all the factors that contributed to the fortune and failure of these two teams. What they are doing is coming to conclusions based on different fallacies to place the blame on Iverson. It's assumed that Denver improved as a team solely based on the Billups/Iverson trade, yet there are other influences that can not be ignored. Marcus Camby was traded and replaced by a healthy Nene. This was extremely important, Nene had gone through two injury plagued season before returning to the line up at 100%. He was a much more active player on offense than Camby and a more than capable post defender while Camby was more of an weak side shot blocker and of the ball defender. Another factor was that the West was a lot less competitive than the previous season. Denver one 50 games in probably the toughest conference in history and drew the Lakers, the best team in the league, and was over matched. With Billups, they won just four more games and drew more favorable match ups on their way to the Western Conference Finals where they were again eliminated by the Lakers. It could be pointed out that they were not swept this time and that they played the Lakers very tough. With Iverson gone, Melo was assumed the role of Alpha Dog and led the Denver offense, but it is unfair to give all the credit due to Billups and blame Iverson for the previous failures.

Hopefully this offseason will end with Iverson playing for a team and having to prove himself yet again to all his doubters. Currently the last two teams in the running are the Charlotte Bobcats (reunited with Larry Brown) and the Miami Heat (teamed with Dwayne Wade). Although I'm an Iverson fan, I do understand that there are some changes that do need to be made to his game for him to fit in with either of these teams. He needs to become more of a distributor to show other GMs that doubted that he can remain in this league while being a worthy contributor to a winning team. Allen Iverson has had an illustrious career, he deserves to have it end on a note where it is recognized as such.