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interessanter Iverson-Artikel...
It's time to trade Iverson
(Tue, Apr/12/2005)
PHILADELPHIA - He would never do it. That's what everyone assumes when it comes to Billy King and the one move he could make to turn the Sixers into something more than what they are now - a possible playoff team. There's one card King has left, but no one around him believes he'll play it.
If the Sixers' victory in Washington on Saturday - a game they won without Allen Iverson and Chris Webber - didn't persuade King to think hard about this franchise's future, maybe tonight's game against Boston will. Should the Sixers win tonight in a similar fashion, should they rise to one game of the Atlantic Division lead without Iverson and his sprained thumbs, King should start considering the one course of action for 2005-06 that he won't dare discuss publicly.
He should trade Iverson this offseason.
"We've got a four-game winning streak going," King, the Sixers' president and general manager, said Monday. "Why would you want to bring up any negativity?"
Why? Because improving the Sixers' chances of winning an NBA title is presumably King's primary goal, and the team's current situation, is positive only in the shortest of terms. This winning streak has succeeded only in pushing the Sixers to seventh place in the Eastern Conference. If they remain there at season's end, an early playoff exit at the hands of the defending NBA champions, the Detroit Pistons, surely awaits them.
Then what? Under the status quo, the Sixers still will be trying to the solve the square-peg, round-hole puzzle of building a championship-caliber team around a 5-10 guard who takes more than 24 shots a game and makes less than 10. Only this time, Iverson will be 30, and the term aging superstar will fit him far better than his favorite pair of baggy jeans ever did.
The warnings against trading Iverson have stayed the same for some time: He's all the Sixers have, he's the reason fans pay to watch them, and besides, the Sixers will never receive full value in exchange for him. Those arguments held up better years ago, when Iverson and Larry Brown were leading a pro basketball renaissance here. But now, even with Iverson, the Sixers are hovering around .500, and the Wachovia Center has never seemed so cavernous. Whatever allure Iverson once had to pull fans into his home arena has faded. His novelty here is gone now, and if he were to be traded, there would be no wreckage left in his wake, as there was when Charles Barkley left - at least nothing worse than what is here now.
Remember: The Sixers still would have Webber, Marc Jackson and a young core - Andre Iguodala, Kyle Korver, Samuel Dalembert and Willie Green - that might never fully flourish so long as Iverson stays. In making Iverson the team's primary ball-handler, coach Jim O'Brien has proven no more proficient than his predecessors in diversifying the Sixers' offense. Korver, Iguodala and Dalembert average a combined 22 shots per game - two fewer than the player who is supposed to be the team's point guard. Whenever Iverson is healthy, Green, whom O'Brien has called the Sixers' best on-the-ball defender, can't find his way onto the floor. Yes, Iverson's points and assists are up this season, but so are his turnovers, and he is still the alpha and omega of every offensive possession - and still a defensive liability because of his size.
Nevertheless, because Iverson is leading the league in scoring again, because his body hasn't completely broken down yet, he has more market value now than he will ever have again. Send him to Seattle in a sign-and-trade for Ray Allen, or to New Orleans, who might be willing to put together a package that includes talented rookie J.R. Smith and center Jamaal Magloire, and the Sixers instantly become a bigger team, and one more suited to playing O'Brien's spread-the-floor offense and rotation defense.
Such a deal would be stunning, if only because King, since taking over total control of the team's player-personnel duties, has regarded the notion of trading Iverson as blasphemy, an idea too terrible to be entertained.
Perhaps he fears a public backlash. Perhaps he simply doesn't want to be known as The Man Who Traded Allen Iverson. Whatever the case, the time has come for the Sixers to toast Iverson's nine seasons in Philadelphia, thank him for his unsurpassed effort and incandescent talent, and say goodbye.
"It's hard for me, even when we play well, to sit and watch," Iverson said Monday, lamenting his injuries. "I just know I can help more on the court than on the bench."
Actually, he can most help this franchise this off-season, if Billy King finally finds the gumption to do what must be done.
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