The Tragic Legacy of Allen Iverson

I’ve always been conflicted in my admiration for Allen Iverson. In some ways he has been the absolute worst thing that happened to basketball. Or at least, the figurehead of one of the NBA’s worst eras. Yet he carried so many redeeming qualities many of us wanted to believe he was simply misunderstood.

As a fan, I fear his legacy will be as misconstrued as the optimistic tag we labeled him with.

Once unguardable, Iverson is now merely untouchable. The season began with the understanding that the Grizzlies were it. The last chance. And he blew it.
The Clippers already have a dysfunctional point guard, Isiah Thomas is no longer employed in the NBA and Larry Brown has already picked up a malcontent shooting guard. Even the Knicks, simply trying to get through a year in an admitted throw away season refused to sign Iverson in favor of developing players who likely aren’t in their long range plans.

History will not be kind to Allen Iverson. Always a polarizing figure between old and young, purists and innovators, the last two years will now sadly be used as the closing arguments for his harshest critics.

But Iverson is as much a victim of timing as he is his mind set. His biggest flaw is not that he insisted on his game past his prime, but rather, that the game passed him up while he was still in it.

Iverson is like that ex-girlfriend met during a weird transition moment in life: she might have been all kinds of wrong but she was exactly what you needed at the time.

Allen Iverson was at his peak from 1999-2005 during one of the weaker moment in NBA history. He was THE post Jordan superstar in a league struggling to find a new identity and on the verge of rebranding its style of play. The talent was watered down and the coaches overbearing.

In the NBA he came up in, you could build a winning team around the singular talents of one player if you surrounded him by role players capable of grinding games to a halt. Remember, it wasn’t too long ago most NBA teams centered their offense around isolation plays for star athletes.

And in Iverson, Philadelphia had a superstar who was so unique from myriad of Jordan clones general managers were trying to build teams around. Even better, he was a far cry from the “we make a lot of money, but we spend a lot of money” aftertaste of the lockout. He played with passion. He cared.

Unfortunately his unique style of play may hurt Iverson’s legacy the most. Iverson appealed to a hip-hop generation with a style both innovative and flashy yet entirely opposed to everything we know about winning basketball. It was worshipped and mimicked on blacktops across the nation even as most experts acknowledged we’d never see anyone ever fully replicate Iverson.

Make no mistake about it, in his prime you could win with Iverson. He was that good. It may not have been THE formula for winning but it was a successful one. Why won’t we remember it as such. Because it cannot be replicated.

In the hands of lesser talents Iverson had a style that led to brutal displays of basketball. You can pull off a reasonable facsimile of Jordan if you can ignore all the dunk highlights and realize that his game was rooted in fundamentals and drive. Iverson played a flawed style that only works if you are as good as Iverson. And therein lies the problem: for what he does, no one has ever been as good as Iverson.