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The Anatomy of a Downfall

In the midst of the 2008 financial meltdown an economics professor named Nouriel Roubini gained notoriety for having predicted the crisis before an audience of IMF economists in 2006. Later nicknamed Dr. Doom, Roubini painted a picture of massive homeowner defaults, swelling oil costs and deflating consumer confidence. His audience swiftly dismissed him as a pessimist. The economy was still growing and unemployment and interest rates were still low. Defeated but undaunted, Roubini returned to his humble lectern at NYU. A year later he was invited back to the conference. This time he was hailed a prophet.

This is the story of all dramatic descents. We don’t notice the cracks in the armor until it is too late. Only when we look back do we see that the seemingly unrelated signs we took for granted were in fact deeply intertwined.

Enter Generation Lebron

The story of Allen Iverson’s precipitous demise over the last year can actually be traced back to the night of the 2003 NBA Draft. At the time the league was in a precarious spot. Jordan had just bid his final farewell, television viewership of the Finals that June had dropped more than 25% from the previous year and the marriage between hip-hop culture and the NBA was leaving many lifelong fans feeling disconnected from the game they once loved. The infusion of more and more athletic but unskilled teenagers each year had also compromised the overall quality of play. It didn’t help that by 2003 a record 42 early entrants had declared themselves eligible for the draft or that critics of the game believed the league had too many teams and not enough talent to go around, or that ticket prices for even bottom-of-the-barrel teams were increasingly exorbitant, or that the players themselves seemed entitled, selfish and, worst of all, thuggish. And if all of this wasn’t enough, four days after the 2003 draft Kobe Bryant, one of the league’s pristine performers, found himself embroiled in a sexual assault scandal that would derail his ascent to the summit of power.

Fortunately, the selections of Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh that night would give the league the ammunition it needed to unofficially begin laying the groundwork for a new era. Melo’s early missteps aside, this group would have the talent, charisma and telegenic presence to steer a league that was quickly losing the interest and support of fans back in the right direction. Along with Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Deron Williams the following year, these four selections would form the foundation of a revamped “hip without the hop” NBA over the next several years.

The Palace Brawl

The Pistons-Pacers brawl a year and a half after the 2003 draft would be the next chapter foreshadowing A.I.’s descent. I can think of only a small handful of live television watching experiences in my lifetime that have been as alarming: Lawrence Taylor snapping Joe Theismann’s leg in two on Monday Night Football, Howard Cossell saying “look at that little monkey run” in reference to Redskins receiver Alvin Garrett, again on Monday Night Football, Mike Tyson biting Evander Holyfield’s ear off, and the infamous Bronco chase. The whole incident just sort of happened and didn’t stop happening and got uglier by the second. Afterward, I even wondered why in an era of time delays and censorship czars the producers didn’t cut to commercial or blank the screen. Then it dawned on me that they were probably as shocked as I was.

The fallout of the brawl has been written about extensively. Players were branded and suspended. Several of them – Jamal Tinsely, Stephen Jackson and Ron Artest – still haven’t shaken free of the stink. The Pacers’ bid for a championship was derailed. More importantly, though, the fight gave David Stern the green light to commence a mass cleansing of the league’s image.

When at the start of the 2005 season the league instituted a dress code several players openly criticized the policy. The suggestion was that the code was racially motivated or, at the very least, driven by a prejudice against hip-hop culture. In addition to yet again being branded the poster child for the league’s image woes, Iverson was among the most vocal and consistent voices of dissent. The dress core conflicted with his individual sensibility, certainly, but he also rested his appeal on principle, namely that the NBA didn’t mind profiting from hip hop when it suited its interests. The mainstream media duly ripped him for daring to call a spade a spade. Meanwhile, Lebron James, the very symbol of the fresh face the NBA wanted to replace Iverson’s with, fully supported the dress code. “It doesn’t take that long to get dressed, you get here and you put your uniform on,” Lebron said in ESPN.com interview at the start of his third season. “I follow the rules just like I’ve always done. I don’t have a problem with it.” Dwayne Wade also embraced the idea of dressing up. Carmelo Anthony took to the new rule as well.

The diverging views of the elder statesman and his youthful counterparts symbolized the chasm that Iverson was caught between. His generation had been shaped in reaction to the tidily attired Jordan era athlete. Generation Lebron had been shaped in reaction to thuggishly attired athlete that Iverson embodied. And whereas Iverson felt as though he had to represent the ‘hood because the ‘hood had always supported him, Lebron didn’t seem bound by those same codes. He’d never been the underdog, the outcast, the outsider. He’d never had to fight for respect because of his size, his swagger or his sense of style. Following the rules didn’t feel like a betrayal of the values and beliefs he’d been shaped by. He came into a league that allowed him to be himself, that didn’t judge him by the number of tattoos he had, children he’d fathered or even the fact that he’d skipped college altogether. In short, if Jordan’s generation had paved the road for Iverson to make millions selling sneakers and hundreds of millions playing a game he loves, Iverson’s generation had paved the road for Lebron to simply be himself.

Tarnishing a Legacy

The 2005-2006 season would also mark Iverson’s tenth in the league. He would be selected to his sixth All-Star game and seventh and final All-NBA team. Statistically speaking, he would be a peak performer, averaging more than 33 points and being among the league leaders in steals and assists. But the 76ers would finish 38-44 and fail to make the playoffs.

As Philly’s disappointing season was concluding that spring, three seemingly innocuous and unrelated events occurred off the court that would ultimately begin shifting our collective perception of Allen Iverson’s incredible individual statistical output over the years.

At the tail end of regular season play, the Houston Rockets hired a 34 year-old metrics mastermind and MIT MBA named Daryl Morey as its Assistant G.M. Morey had no basketball pedigree to speak of, but he’d made a name for himself as part of a growing number of metricians applying analytical methods and technology to player and team evaluation. The argument underlying these new theoretical methodologies was that traditional qualitative basketball stats lie or at least don’t tell the whole story. On paper a player who’s on the court longer, has the ball in his hands more often and shoots a ton may look better than a player with fewer minutes and touches, but looks can be deceiving. The theories, which the wider sports world had first been exposed to via Michael Lewis’ 2003 bestseller, Moneyball, cut against the grain of conventional wisdom and took into account all sorts of “stats” that may not be sexy to the average fan but were critical to a franchise’s success. Although several of Morey’s metrics contemporaries had been gaining influence – most notably ESPN’s John Hollinger – he was the first one officially invited into a team’s inner sanctum. Within a year, Morey would be promoted to GM. The following season (2007-2008) the Rockets would run off the second-longest winning streak in the NBA.

A month after Houston hired Morey, noted trendspotter Malcolm Gladwell published one of his quirky, fascinating and highly influential book reviews in The New Yorker. The book was titled The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths of Sport. The review and the book would take specific aim at Iverson. In Wages, the authors, a triumvirate of economists, asked a particularly provocative question: How do we know Allen Iverson is a great player? We may know he puts up great numbers and that we enjoyed his performances, but how did we know those performances weren’t at the expense of his team? This really wasn’t a new question. It had been posed by Iverson detractors in different forms for years. This contingent had always regarded Iverson as a gunner who didn’t make his teammates any better and was just generally bad for the game. The problem was that Iverson produced, fans across the globe loved him and the NBA needed him. At long last, the A.I. faultfinders had a new toy: complex formulas. Wrote Gladwell:

Weighing the relative value of fouls, rebounds, shots taken, turnovers, and the like, they’ve created an algorithm that, they argue, comes closer than any previous statistical measure to capturing the true value of a basketball player. The algorithm yields what they call a Win Score, because it expresses a player’s worth as the number of wins that his contributions bring to his team. According to their analysis, Iverson’s finest season was in 2004-05, when he was worth ten wins, which made him the thirty-sixth-best player in the league. In the season in which he won the Most Valuable Player award, he was the ninety-first-best player in the league. In his worst season (2003-04), he was the two-hundred-and-twenty-seventh-best player in the league. On average, for his career, he has ranked a hundred and sixteenth. In some years, Iverson has not even been the best player on his own team. Looking at the findings that Berri, Schmidt, and Brook present is enough to make one wonder what exactly basketball experts—coaches, managers, sportswriters—know about basketball.

The stats raised considerable questions about the player known as “The Answer.” After all, if he was so great how on earth could he rank so poorly by any statistical measure. And why were his teams losing so many games in a supposedly weak Eastern conference? And why couldn’t he seem to co-exist with another star player? Gladwell’s review ended with a damning indictment of Iverson and of those enamored with his style of play:

We see Allen Iverson, over and over again, charge toward the basket, twisting and turning and writhing through a thicket of arms and legs of much taller and heavier men—and all we learn is to appreciate twisting and turning and writhing. We become dance critics, blind to Iverson’s dismal shooting percentage and his excessive turnovers, blind to the reality that the Philadelphia 76ers would be better off without him.

Much as I admire Gladwell, by resorting to misinformation and hyperbole he revealed the factual ignorance emblematic of the typical A.I. Hater:

• “Dismal shooting”: For the 2005-2006 season Iverson shot just under 45% from the field. The team shot just over 45% from the field. The league average was between 44- 45%.
• “Excessive turnovers”: Iverson finished 10^th in the league in turnovers per game. Dwayne Wade, Gilbert Arenas, Steve Nash, Tony Parker, Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce and Lebron James all averaged more turnover per game. For the season, Iverson’s assist to turnover ratio was well over 2:1.
• “The Philadelphia 76ers would be better off without him”: Without him in 2007, Philly finished with three fewer wins than the previous season. In 2008 they finished 40-42 and in 2009 they finished 41-41. Both years ended with with first round playoff exits from a decidedly weaker Eastern Conference playoffs.

Moreover, the new metrics couldn’t account for Iverson’s competitive drive, his leadership, his durability, his conditioning, his hustle, the amount of pressure his relentless style of play put on a defense, the number of fouls he drew on key players early in the game, and the extent to which forcing his particular tempo pressured opponents to alter their style of play. None of that mattered, though. According to the new metrics Iverson’s game was so flawed that his legacy was in need of revision. And that’s what began to happen.

When the names of the 22 players invited to try out for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team “leaked” in the spring of 2006, Iverson’s was noticeably absent. It wouldn’t have been such a big if a) he hadn’t openly lobbied for an invitation, b) he wasn’t having one of the best all-around seasons of his career, c) he hadn’t made great strides in remaking his image over the previous three seasons, d) Shaq hadn’t been extended a “standing” invitation, and e) Luke Ridnour hadn’t been among the invited. In extending an invitation to Chauncey Billups, USA managing director Jerry Colangelo stated he was looking for guard who were more focused on distributing. But why pigeonhole Iverson into the traditional guard slot and not Dwayne Wade and Kobe Bryant? And why not even let him try out? Colangelo hinted that Iverson’s age (he would have been 33 in the 2008) had something to do with it, but Jason Kidd, 35, started every game in Beijing.

Perhaps only Isiah Thomas’ Dream Team snub inspired as much impassioned water cooler discourse as Colangelo’s Iverson dis. After Isiah learned that he’d been left off the greatest team ever assembled in favor of John Stockton, the always candid and emotional Pistons guard openly expressed his disappointment and hurt, even going so far as to suggest that his accomplishments – leading a perennial loser to two titles – had been undervalued because of his size and the game’s bias against point guards who happen to be very capable scorers. Fifteen years later it seemed Iverson had run up against the same stigma. Isiah responded to the snub by scorching John Stockton’s Jazz for 44 that November. Iverson reacted to the snub with a shrug and a typical ‘I ain’t upset’ statement, but over the next two games the league felt his fury. Against Houston he dropped 40. The very next game against Washington he dropped 47. In the two straight wins he also averaged double-digit assists. In the end, though, those performances couldn’t prevent his reputation and legacy from taking yet another unwarranted hit.

The Denver Experiment

The trade to Denver in late 2006 paired Iverson with the 6’8” version of himself in Carmelo Anthony. It was a match made in hip-hop heaven: two tatted-up scoring beasts with braids. They didn’t disappoint either. After a bumpy start, Denver won 9 of its last 10 and squeaked into the playoffs where they even managed to score a surprising game 1 victory against the eventual champion Spurs before bowing out 4-1. Hopes were high heading into 2007-2008. But early in the season starting center Nene Hilario tested positive for testicular cancer. He would make only 16 appearances all season. Nene’s absence left Denver with an offensively challenged front line of Kenyon Martin, whose reconstructed knee would allow him to play more than 50 games for the first time in three seasons, and Marcus Camby, a career 10 ppg. scorer. Iverson’s starting backcourt mate would be the journeyman Anthony Carter who’d never averaged more than 8 ppg. Even with this lineup, the 2007-2008 Nuggets managed to win 50 games, the second-most in franchise history. More impressively, they accomplished this feat amid a 2007-2008 Western Conference playoff race that is regarded as one of the most competitive races in NBA History. That year eight Western Conference teams finished with 50 wins compared to only three in the Eastern Conference. Wikipedia had this to say about the playoff race that year: “Up until April 4, 2008, not a single Western Conference team had secured a playoff spot, and the 8th-seeded team was a mere 6.5 games behind the 1st seed. Additionally, the quality of the teams ensured that the Golden State Warriors [48 wins] finished with the highest winning percentage of any non-playoff team in NBA history since the switch to the eight-team playoff format.” Behind the play of Iverson and Anthony, Denver squeaked into the 8^th spot only to get steamrolled by a revamped Lakers team. The criticism and speculation began as soon as the final buzzer sounded. Once again, A.I. took an undue share of the blame for the team’s failure to get past the first round.

Three games into the 2008-2009 season Denver shipped Iverson to Detroit in exchange for Chauncey Billups. In November it was called a “blockbuster trade”. By February it was clear Detroit had been looking to dump its long-term commitment to Billups. and Iverson’s expiring $20 million contract was a long-term cost-saving measure. The 32 year-old Billups still had two more guaranteed years after ’08-’09 at more than $12 million per and up-and-coming point guard Rodney Stuckey nipping at his heels.

In Denver, Billups stepped into an ideal situation. Nene was healthy again. J.R. Smith and Carmelo were a year older and more mature. Defensive specialist Dahntay Jones had been acquired in the off season. Kenyon Martin had just come off his first healthy season in three years. And then there was the addition of Chris “Birdman” Anderson, an athletic freak who’d been in and out of the NBA with substance abuse issues.

Iverson’s situation wasn’t as fortunate. He joined a roster of aging, disgruntled vets, a first year, first time coach, and a franchise that was not-so secretly preparing for transition. Imagine trading Brett Favre to a grind-it-out, conservative team and asking him to still be Brett Favre. That’s basically what happened to Iverson in Detroit. (Which also the raises the question, why is it okay for 40 year-old, hired gun Brett Farve to take away playing time from developing players and not okay for 34 year-old Iverson to?). It was obviously a bad fit but when Denver started winning and Detroit went up in flames none of thes factors found their way into the media analysis of the trade. It was as if the entire industry had been handed an identical Billups-for-President script. Even the metrics geeks who’d made such a bru ha ha about algorithms reverted to superficial comparisons to not only prove Denver was a better team with Billups, but that Iverson was a cancer.

Operation Battier

Exactly halfway through the ’09 season, another highly influential article – this one by Moneyball author and patron saint of the metrics movement, Micheal Lewis – appeared in The New York Times Magazine. This time around Lewis’ mission was to discover what made the unheralded and statistically underwhelming Shane Battier the quintessential “No Stats All Star.” Throughout his carrier Battier had been a marginal offensive player who at no point had averaged more than 14 ppg. And yet whenever he was added to a losing team’s roster, said team started winning. Why? Lewis’ investigation into this peculiar phenomenon revealed that Battier was a statistical anomaly. Pretty much everything he did to help his teams win went unnoticed. Wrote Lewis:

He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates…

Because of the nature of the game – the complex interaction between an individual and his team – players routinely make choices that may on the surface seem to benefit the team. For example, a blocked shot that flies into the stands or a needle threading assist that just misses the opponents fingertips may in fact be self-interested decisions that harm the team. How could an assist benefit the individual at the expense of the team if the team benefits, you ask? Simple, the player may have had a better look at the basket but because of an incentive clause in his contract that rewards him for distributing a certain number of assists per game chosen to make a dangerous pass. Battier, Lewis concluded, might be the least selfish player in the game today because the plays he routinely makes like blocking out so a teammate can grab a rebound benefit the team at the expense of his own stats.

The article caused a stir in the basketball community. By playoff time Battier was being hailed the new official Kobe stopper. After the undermanned Rockets pushed the mighty Lakers to the brink of elimination in the second round of the playoffs, the Battier theory grew into a kind of guiding principle. This past fall Chris Ballard’s basketball book, The Art of a Beautiful Game, offered a more in-depth profile of Battier and the Rockets. By the start of the 2009-2010 season Battier had become the new face of the NBA underdog—a perfectly nerdy, colorless (literally) cog in the statistician’s schema.

Although Lewis only mentioned Allen Iverson once in the Battier profile – to point out how badly he hurts his team when going left – the points he went to great lengths to make about the game’s direction were obviously aimed at tarnishing the already vulnerable superstar’s legacy. Ironically, the very same weekend the story ran Iverson was preparing for what may be his last All-Star game appearance by shaving his signature braids and openly pondering life after basketball.

Chauncey Billups: The Anti-Iverson

There is still the matter of the Billups/Iverson trade to sift through, though. According to the media, the trade revealed how invaluable Billups is and how overvalued Iverson was. Discounting Denver’s playoff run, the media establishment based its conclusion on four regular season wins, the difference between the 2007-2008 Nuggets with Iverson and the 2008-2009 Nuggets with Billups. Let’s dig a little deeper, though.

We can start with an “old” stats comparison. In 2007-2008 Iverson averaged 26.4 points (3^rd in the league, 7.1 assists (9^th in the league), 2 steals (4^th in the league), and 3 rebounds. He also shot close to 46% from the field, his second highest average in his career and led the league with 7.9 free throws per game. Finally, he averaged fewer turnovers than ever, finishing ninth in the league in the category. Just to give some perspective on the matter, Steve Nash (1^st), Deron Williams (2^nd), Jason Kidd (3^rd), Kobe Bryant (5^th), Lebron James (6^th), and Carmelo Anthony (7^th) all finished with more turnovers. In 2008-2009, Billups’ line was 17.7, 6.4, 1.2, 3.0. He shot just under 42% from the field and just over 40% from three-point range. Incidentally, Iverson’s 34.5% from deep in ’07-’08 was a career best. If nothing else, these stats help dispel the myth that a) A.I. was a turnover machine and b) he was a bad shooter. In fact, he shot slightly above the league average in field goal percentage and slightly below the league’s three-point average.

Now to the “advanced” stats. Two measures that have gained prominence within the metrics community and that can provide us with a fair comparison of individual players vis-a-vis their teams (i.e. how well they perform in relation to their team’s success) are the PER (Player Efficiency Rating) and WS (Win Shares). In the words of its creator John Hollinger, the PER “sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.” The WS is a complex but highly regarded algorithm created by the authors of aforementioned The Wages of Wins. It calculates the number of wins a player is worth in any given year. Based on figures I retrieved from basketball-reference.com, 2007-2008 Iverson had a definitively better year and bigger impact on his team than 2008-2009 Chauncey Billups. Iverson’s ’07-’08 PER was 20.09, which would have made him an All-Star caliber player based Hollinger’s metric. Meanwhile, ’08-’09 Billups had an 18.8 PER, which would have notched him just above solid second option status. Likewise, 11.6 of the Nuggets’ ’07-08 wins were attributable to Iverson. By contrast, 9.9 of the ’08-’09 Nuggets wins were attributable to Billups.

What’s interesting about all of this is that by the midway point of the 2009 season Billups not Melo had established himself as a serious MVP candidate. At the end of the 54 win season, Billups was even awarded a slot on the All-NBA roster. A season earlier Billups had led the Pistons to 59 victories and and a fourth straight divisional title while amassing individual numbers that mirrored the ones he put up for the ’09 Nuggets. By contrast, though, his 23.6 PER that year was near MVP level and his 13.5 WS was the fifth-highest in the league. And yet, Billups was never even mentioned as an MVP candidate and didn’t even make third-team All-NBA. So, in essence, Billups was playing worse on a worse team and yet being credited with turning the Nuggets around in spite of the addition, return and improvement of several key players. On the other hand, despite a statistically better season in ’08, Iverson’s name was never even mentioned in the MVP race. Moreover, when the All-NBA teams were announced at the end of the 2008 season, Iverson’s name was nowhere to be found. In fact, Denver was the only Western Conference playoff team without a player represented on the All-NBA squad that year.

As Iverson’s Detroit nightmare dragged on, countless commentators, bloggers and casual fans hopped onto the pile of hate suffocating the diminutive guard. Anyone who dared defend him by noting his impossible situation was quickly labeled an Iverson apologist and dismissed. It didn’t help matters when he decided to shut it down before the playoffs, a move widely regarded as quitting on his team. By season’s end, the Answer had been recast as the Cancer and lined up before a firing squad. By playoff time even ABC was in on the act, trotting out severely biased and out of context statistical comparisons like the one below.

Come off the bench?

Toward the end of any great player’s career adjustments have to be made. Jordan started shooting fadeaways from the post. Barkely started chucking set shots from the three point line. Throughout the summer the knock on Iverson was that he wasn’t willing to change his game, which was really an extension of the myth that he relied purely on natural ability, which was an extension of the myth that he wasn’t an intelligent player. In fact, he did change his game in Denver. He took roughly six fewer shots per game, shot a higher field goal and three point percentage, and cut down his turnovers even though Denver played at breakneck speed. At 33, he also continued to lead the league in free throws, which made him an anomaly among guards who typically have a harder time getting into the lane and drawing fouls as they age. In fact, in 2007-2008 no other player shorter than 6’5” ranked in the top 20 in free throws made or attempted. I would submit that as Iverson aged, he became adept at creating contact and drawing fouls, which, given his size and the limitations it inherently imposed was tantamount to developing a new facet of his game.

Let’s look now at the come-off-the-bench campaign: Picture Alvin Gentry telling 35 year-old Steve Nash that he has to sit behind Goran Dragic? Imagine Rick Carlisle telling 36 year-old Jason Kidd to hand the ball off to J.J. Barrea? We can’t fathom either of these scenarios, yet when it came to sitting Iverson behind Rodney Stuckey in Detroit or Mike Conley in Memphis, everyone seemed to agree that he should accept a reserve role. When he balked at both ideas the immediate assumption was that he wanted to be the star wherever he went. In fact, he never said that. He just said he still saw himself as a starter in this league, which if you look at the games he played with Memphis is true. In three games he averaged 12.3 points and 3.7 assists in 22 minutes. Given those numbers he would have averaged 20 points and 6 assists in 36 minutes, which would have made him the leading scorer and the team’s second leading assist man. Last time I checked 20 and 6 were starter numbers.

Here’s the thing, though: once you’ve labeled something a cancer as Iverson was in Detroit, you’ve only got two options. Either you let the cancer kill you or you remove it. NBA owners and GMs have made their decision. Now that the keys to the NBA’s future are firmly in the hands of Generation Lebron, Allen Iverson has become a dispensable commodity whose ego outsizes his utility at this point. Put differently, his productivity didn’t decline as much as his market value. His so-called ability to put people in seats no longer matched up with the perceived baggage he would bring. Practically speaking, Denver’s Pepsi Center ranked 15^th out of 30 in league attendance in 2005-2006, the season before Iverson arrived. By the time he left in ’08, Denver’s attendance ranking had fallen to 17^th; ; however, its overall attendance had risen by almost 10,000. Interestingly enough, attendance fell by more than 5,000 this past season. In essence, even the addition of the hometown boy (Billups), the fan favorite (Chis Anderson) and the winning ways didn’t outweigh the subtraction of Iverson.

 The Real Legacy

 By the start of the 2009-2010 season nearly every team in the NBA had a pint-sized spark plug who could break down a defense and score in bunches. Aaron Brooks, Rajon Rondo, J.J. Barrea, T.J. Ford, D.J. Augustine, Earl Boykins, Monta Ellis, Nate Robinson, Will Bynum, rookies Jonny Flynn and Ty Lawson—all of them can exist in the league as undersized point guards who can score because of what Iverson (and Isiah before him) accomplished. He broke convention and invented a new position for small guards on the NBA hardwood. Where once the order of the day was the oversized point guard who could see over defenses a la Magic Johnson and Penny Hardaway, the new trend is the speedy guard who can create his own shot. Big men can’t camp out in the lane anymore. Bigger, stronger guards can’t hand check smaller guards anymore. It’s a league built for an Iverson type guard, which perhaps explains why Brandon Jennings is off to such a torrid start.

Brandon Jennings was only seven when Iverson entered the league. He remembers watching his idol cross Jordan over as his defining moment, the instant he began to dream of being the next Iverson. At times watching Jennings is like witnessing the second coming of A.I. Aside from the wiry body and springy legs, he is equally unguardable, equally creative with the ball, and equally electric in the arena. Jennings is perhaps the better passer and shooter and Iverson the better pure scorer and competitor, but it is obvious they are cut from a similar cloth. Indeed, there is a certain irony in Iverson’s retirement occurring just as Jennings’ career is beginning, just as there is a certain irony in teams passing on Jennings in the draft because of the so-called character and maturity concerns that dogged Iverson throughout his career.

Now that Iverson has officially retired (albeit in an age of constant unretiring) many will say that he brought this on himself. And maybe they will be right. But what exactly does it mean to say he brought this on himself? That he didn’t hold his tongue? That he expressed who he was and how he felt? That he was human and not some manufactured personality? If anything, his ability to withstand punishment on the court and weather criticism off the court, to express feeling, to be vulnerable, to allow others to witness his joy and frustration is what fans across the globe have connected with. All he ever seemed to ask for in return was acceptance, understanding, and appreciation—the same things we all want. I close this with one final thought. If after so many years of superlative service one of the game’s greats can be so ingloriously sent to the showers does this say more about who who he failed to be or what we failed to see?