Thank You, Iverson
by 9ersDubsGiantSharks on Nov 25, 2009 8:15 PM PST
40 comments
As I'm sure all of you have read by know, but one of the greatest players in the NBA, Allen Iverson has retired. He's my favorite player and I hate to see him go like this. 1 MVP, 11 all-star appearances, USA team, scoring champion, good defender, great heart, and a warrior.
Thank You Iverson for dropping 48 on the Lakers in game 1 of the NBA finals, a great performance.
Thank You Iverson for breaking Michael Jordan's legs.
Thank You Iverson for breaking Tyronn Lue's ankles and stepping over him after making the shot.
Thank You Iverson for being a great player, and we've all loved the crazy shots and performances you put on.
Remember this is the guy that lead a not so great 2001 76ers team and led them to the NBA finals only to lose to Los Angeles, but a game changer, and in my belief a better player than Kobe and LeBron in his prime.
GSOM, (for now), say goodbye to one of the greatest scorers and players of the game, Allen Iverson.
This FanPost is a submission from a member of the mighty Golden State of Mind community. While we're all here to throw up that W, these words do not necessarily reflect the views of the GSoM Crew. Still, chances are the preceding post is Unstoppable Baby!
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Sike.
Man, hang this up. Iverson would still be a player in this league if he didn’t have an unjustified inflated ego. He’ll be back the first chance a bench player on a contender goes down.
by slapchop on Nov 25, 2009 8:49 PM PST reply actions 0 recs
Thank him somewhere else...
I have no respect for the guy.
by Cpt. Jack in the Box on Nov 25, 2009 9:34 PM PST reply actions 0 recs
Yeah … personal “beliefs” notwithstanding, Iverson was never one of the great players — not close to the level of prime Kobe, and even further from prime (i.e. current) LeBron. Check out the Wins Produced or Plus-Minus numbers if you don’t believe me. That said, in his prime he was a total joy to watch, both on court and off. A mad genius with the ball and a charismatic entertainer with the mic. Or maybe a charismatic entertainer with the ball and a mad genius with the mic? In any case, a true original who will be sorely missed. Assuming he is actually retiring, I wish him all the best.
There will be no extra point!
by Sleepy Freud on Nov 25, 2009 9:45 PM PST reply actions 0 recs
Lebron wishes he will ever be as good as Iverson.
by Am22mO on Nov 25, 2009 11:30 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
Thank you for clarifying the manner and quality of the thinking behind your analysis. ;-)
Care to define exactly what you mean by “good”? I mean, if you’re talking about some subjective measure (style points, charisma, good looks, etc.) sure — believe what you want to believe. If you mean anything remotely related to winning basketball games, it’s not even close: LeBron right now is miles more efficient, effective, productive, etc. than Iverson was at his peak. I could drop a whole bunch of numbers on you, but something tells me you wouldn’t be swayed by them. Suffice it to say: LeBron is in the same category of player as Jordan, Magic, and Bird. Iverson at his peak was more in the category of Monta Ellis — possibly not even that good.
There will be no extra point!
by Sleepy Freud on Nov 26, 2009 6:33 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs
. Iverson at his peak was more in the category of Monta Ellis
And Iverson did it game in and game out for over a decade. If Montay can have a career as great as Iverson(and remain a warrior…which greatly increases the odds that both don’t happen) we’ll be very thankful.
Standing on the moon
Where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon
But I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco
On a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven
At this crescent in the sky
by Skeptic con Urquell on Nov 26, 2009 10:21 AM PST up reply actions 1 recs
Agreed. Iverson’s durabiility and motor were a couple of his best qualities. He always had a lot of footballer in him. I’m about his size, but if I had to endure some of the beatings he took en route to the rim, I would have limped home crying to the Sleepy-ette…
There will be no extra point!
by Sleepy Freud on Nov 26, 2009 6:25 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
p.s.
Is this Colton Iverson kid now playing for the Golden Gophers any relation…?
There will be no extra point!
by Sleepy Freud on Nov 26, 2009 6:53 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
lol monta is better
iverson shot under 40% a ton . If Monta/any good scorer took as many shots as him they would score like he did, if any player in the league handled the ball the entire game they would get as many assists per game as he did. Aaron Brooks can have a similar career if given the same ammount of minutes, freedom, and shots.
Marco Belinelli's Biggest Fan
by montadaboss on Nov 26, 2009 2:51 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
Yeah
Yeah, to me the biggest thing that keeps Iverson from being one of the true “greats” is that he was such a volume scorer. He scored a staggering amount of points, but the number of shots he took to do it was even more staggering.
That said, he had a hell of a motor and showed a lot of courage down low with the big boys.
"We're in this thing!" My adopted Giant: "Raptor Jesus" Guzman, "Sweet Jesus" Guzman and Jesus H. Guzman.
by Goofus on Nov 27, 2009 11:21 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs
Iverson
Name me one player who could score on the 2001 team Iverson took to the championship. Name me 1 other person. Eric Snow? He was good as a spot up shooter but his strength was his passing. Mutumbo? Aaron Mckie? Iverson HAD to take all the shots for his team to have any success. The only shame was that the 76ers couldn’t find a shooter while Iverson was still in his prime. Monta hasn’t even approached how good Iverson was in 2001.
by ewil1321 on Nov 27, 2009 4:26 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
its a miracle
that they even got that far. Iverson WAS that team. The only other person I can think of who brought their team to the championship alone is Lebron.
by ewil1321 on Nov 27, 2009 6:38 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
brought their team to the championship alone
This is pure fiction, even speaking “figuratively.” It’s disrespectful to Iverson’s teammates, and it’s been debunked many times.
Beyond the pleasant fairy tale of how Iverson “single-handedly” brought his team to the championship, there’s not one shred of actual evidence (plus-minus, wins produced, etc.) that suggests that Iverson is remotely in the same class of player as Magic, Bird, Jordan, or LeBron. Indeed, studies by Dave Berri and others suggest that in many seasons (including the one in which the Philadelphia 76ers team went to the championship) Iverson was below NBA average in terms of his contributions to winning.
All NBA fans, especially Iverson mythmakers, would do well to check out the Wages of Wins journal, or at least Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on Iverson, Dave Berri and his colleagues, and the idea that the rating of a player should focus on a player’s contributions to wins rather than his stylishness on the court or his charisma in front of the microphone. From Gladwell:
According to their analysis, Iverson’s finest season was in 2004-05, when he was worth ten wins, which made him the 36th-best player in the league. In the season in which he won the Most Valuable Player award, he was the 91st-best player in the league. In his worst season (2003-04), he was the 227th -best player in the league. On average, for his career, he has ranked 116th. In some years, Iverson has not even been the best player on his own team.
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. "One can play basketball," the authors conclude. "One can watch basketball. One can both play and watch basketball for a thousand years. If you do not systematically track what the players do, and then uncover the statistical relationship between these actions and wins, you will never know why teams win and why they lose."
There will be no extra point!
by Sleepy Freud on Nov 27, 2009 7:37 PM PST up reply actions 1 recs
More on the 00-01 76ers:
The notion that Iverson “had to shoot” because no one else could has very little basis in fact. Though it’s a small sample size, PHI was without him for 11 games that year. In games with Iverson, the team as a whole shot 44.8% from the field, while in games without him, they shot 44.5%. That’s pretty much statistically indistinguishable at that point. (Indeed that tiny difference completely disappears if you exclude the final game of the reg season, a meaningless garbage time contest against CHI where Larry Brown sat Iverson and played his other starters more sparingly.) This suggests that Iverson’s ball dominating wasn’t really necessary to the extent that his apologists indicate. It suggests that without Iverson dominating the ball, other guys did have to shoot a bit more, but they weren’t any less successful than Iverson was.
Iverson did not do it alone, though it appears that there are many willing to give him sole credit.
by jae on Nov 28, 2009 3:51 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
The east was very weak that year ...
So it’s not like winning it was that big a deal. Everybody knew that the WCF was the real finals.
And it’s a real shame that team didn’t have a shooter that year. You know, somebody who could hit >40% from three point land.
Oh, wait. They had TWO OF THEM.
So maybe what they needed was a few high-efficiency guys. I dunno, guys with a TS% above Iverson’s .518.
No, they only had FIVE guys who beat that metric.
I guess what they really needed was a monster rebounder or two. You know, a guy who could average 10 boards per 36 minutes.
Oh, wait, they had four of those guys.
No, none of those other guys put up great PPG stats, but of course it was hard to, since Iverson dominated the ball and demanded every shot.
But that was sure going to have a hard time scoring once they got rid of him.
Oh, wait, they were five games better their first full season without him than they were their last full season with him.
by Ronaldinho on Nov 27, 2009 8:29 PM PST up reply actions 2 recs
The game is played at both ends of the court. There was no one else on the team that hoisted the large volume of shots that Iverson did, and perhaps if anyone else tried, they would become wildly ineffective, but that team won largely through defense and rebounding and keeping the score in the range where they could depend on a high volume, low efficiency scorer to do much of the work.
The argument that he had to take all those shots is pretty thin. I don’t expect you to pay that much attention to this, but there is reasonable evidence that if everyone else took just one more shot a game and Iverson’s totals were cut similarly by 4 or 5 shots, the team would have been better off and the players adding that extra shot wouldn’t have somehow failed to connect on all of them. That Iverson’s shot volume did not seem to reflect the quality of his teammates until very, very late in his career suggests that it wasn’t that Iverson had to take the shots, but that he was going to take the shots regardless.
Basketball box scores (and even those of you who pretend not to care about stats almost certainly fall back on looking at how many points Iverson scored - a statistic- as evidence of his greatness) favor looking at offense and players who put up gaudy offensive totals are recognized as more important than those who don’t. But the game really is half defense.
by jae on Nov 28, 2009 12:14 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
WHAT ARE YOU ALL SMOKING?
It must be crack cause Lebron>>>>> Iverson >> Monta
AND ITS NOT EVEN CLOSE OR DEBATABLE!!!!!!
Monta might be getting close to as good as Iverson was, but until he does it for at least 3 or 4 seasons in a row, or unless he starts doing other things like rebounding and getting assists and playing defense better, then he has not attained the status that Iverson had in his years as a perennial allstar.
Maybe everyone just forgets that Iverson used to be very good? He was league MVP and it was no mistake!
by freerandolph on Dec 3, 2009 4:27 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
Iverson was always a terrible defensive player
He also wasn’t half the distributor Lebron is.
He was a better scorer than LBJ and Kobe, but that’s it.
by dprodigy19 on Nov 28, 2009 12:08 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
That depends on what you mean by scorer. He might have scored more points, but he did it by shooting a lot more. Lebron and Kobe, unsurprisingly, are above average in terms of scoring efficiency for their careers while doing it at a high volume. Iverson just did the volume part, his efficiency is pretty bad and really, the only season it was actually good in his whole career, was 2007-2008.
by Missing Barry on Nov 30, 2009 9:28 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs
not huge on iverson but he got absolutely crucified in that trade to detroit
by so ill so d0pe on Nov 25, 2009 11:55 PM PST reply actions 0 recs
Always sad to see a great go.
Good luck to him.
by placid on Nov 26, 2009 12:35 AM PST reply actions 0 recs
If anyone thinks AI is truly done playing...
you’re kidding yourself.
by HOLDEMUPGoldenStateOfOppression on Nov 26, 2009 1:44 AM PST reply actions 1 recs
Iverson is one of the greats! Respect his game, maybe not him, but his game. I love the dude..he's probably the size of every GSM fan, yet he could score on anyone
he’ll be back soon, probably for a playoff team
by Oakland2NYC on Nov 26, 2009 8:46 AM PST reply actions 0 recs
Thank you for retiring ...
… and thus, hopefully, putting an end to all this “let’s get Iverson on the Warriors!” talk.
by Ronaldinho on Nov 26, 2009 9:12 AM PST reply actions 0 recs
Thank you Iverson for not being a cog in a ticket sales scam.
Chris Cohan and Robert Rowell? Oh no hide the children!
by Nuck Chorris on Nov 26, 2009 2:05 PM PST reply actions 0 recs
Allen Iverson
Started the gangsta basketball player ERA.
Good ridance.
Have fun getting into debt, and eventually end up on Oprah.
by sjboy on Nov 27, 2009 2:57 PM PST reply actions 0 recs
Started the gangsta basketball player ERA.
I don’t know if he started it but he was a breath of fresh air in a stale environment. Never seen a player I’d rather hang with than A.I., he seemed like a true warrior and brother.
The league’s new dress code seems like a reactionary move against the free black men of the league, they can’t take away their money but they can dress them to look ridiculous on the bench in the man’s business suit? Can anyone think of a more inappropriate dress for a sports event?
Standing on the moon
Where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon
But I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco
On a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven
At this crescent in the sky
by Skeptic con Urquell on Nov 27, 2009 8:42 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
Wearing a suit is too much to ask?
He did start it. All the superstars before him had virtually 0 run ins with the law. I guess Barkley was tossing guys out of bar windows, but that wasn’t gansta.
Iverson before getting to Georgetown was getting arrested on weapons charges.
That is not a breath of FRESH air, its a breath of POLLUTED air.
by sjboy on Nov 28, 2009 10:18 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs
Wearing a suit is too much to ask?
Yeah to a basketball game it is. Anyone I meet wearing a suit is usually trying to sell me something I don’t need.
You might not like seeing guys like Iverson and Jax living their life the way they want to but it reminds me of what it really means to live in a free country.
Standing on the moon
Where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon
But I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco
On a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven
At this crescent in the sky
by Skeptic con Urquell on Nov 28, 2009 11:26 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs
You know what it “really means” to live in a free country?
It means having to abide by the (sometimes arbitrary) whims of your employer.
There’s nothing in the Bill of Rights about the right to dressing gangsta.
Thing C
by markdash on Nov 28, 2009 5:03 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
In addition....
I have a dress code at work, so do waitresses, so do health care workers. Where is the outrage?
Oh wait, everyone else seems to know their role, and they shut their mouth. Iverson never knows when to, which is why NO ONE wants to hire him.
Just like its a free country for him to shout, its a free country for owners to flip him the bird.
by sjboy on Nov 30, 2009 8:58 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs
All the superstars before him had virtually 0 run ins with the law.
Maybe I’m completely offbase here, but this makes me think you aren’t very old? Iverson did not start some trend of basketball players (or athletes in general?) getting into trouble with the law anymore than Jose Canseco started a steroids trend in baseball…
by Missing Barry on Nov 30, 2009 9:32 AM PST up reply actions 0 recs
It means having to abide by the (sometimes arbitrary) whims of your employer.
Not if you are good enough at your job. My employer wouldn’t dare ask me to dress to suit them because they know I’d just go down the street and work for their competitor.
If the players want to let stern dress them like used car salesmen that’s their business but if I was them I’d dress how I want.
Standing on the moon
Where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon
But I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco
On a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven
At this crescent in the sky
by Skeptic con Urquell on Nov 29, 2009 8:50 PM PST reply actions 0 recs
Do you think the dress code would cause players to go play in Europe, or in the NBDL?
I didn’t think so, either.
And despite your experiences with your employer, most of us are forced to abide by some manner of dress code in our professions. Even my company, with its extremely lax standards, wouldn’t be OK if I decided to start showing up in a T-shirt and shorts every day.
Thing C
by markdash on Nov 30, 2009 12:13 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
most of us are forced to abide by some manner of dress code in our professions.
Well of course . The player uniforms are their dress code but when they are not playing trying to make them dress to suit the style preference of Stern is a form of belittlement , these are grown men not little boys waiting for their daddy’s orders.Not only that it’s offensive to me as a person to see the league disrespect the dress style of a whole segment of our society..
Standing on the moon
Where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon
But I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco
On a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven
At this crescent in the sky
by Skeptic con Urquell on Dec 1, 2009 3:32 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
Technically, they are on the job when they are sitting on the bench at a game or traveling with the team. The job is “entertaining the basketball viewing public” and Stern is pretty sure the best way to do that is by enforcing a dress code. Now, as to your second point about disrespecting a significant and increasingly influential segment of society, that might not be wise. But hasn’t been that big a deal yet either. Apparently the traditional trappings of wealth are still recognized and attractive enough not to tick too many of that group off. Calculated risk, business decision, or statement of preferred cultural standard, it is what it is.
by toddaverth on Dec 3, 2009 11:16 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
It's worth pointing out that the only reason Stern could implement a dress code ...
… is because the players union gave him that authority in the last collective bargaining agreement.
If you have a contract, you’re employer can’t just arbitrarily put new conditions into it. Heck, he can’t put new conditions into it even if he has very good reasons for doing so. It’s a contract.
by Ronaldinho on Dec 5, 2009 12:31 PM PST up reply actions 0 recs
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