Philadelphia 76ers team preview

well now that AI is gone the real healing can begin. it's weird that in the summer after they traded the face of the franchise to make a move towards younger, better players they made no real concerted effort to bring people in to help the rebuilding effort. now, call me crazy, but andre miller is not the ideal player around which to build your team. or even to have on your team when you're rebuilding.

he's a nice player; a point that can push the rock in transition and hit the open man and who doesn't dominate the ball like his predecessor, but he's old or getting there. how much longer will he be able to maintain even his present level of effectiveness? the smart money is on about 1-2 more years before he starts to hit a serious wall when he reaches about age 32 or 33.

iggy, or the second AI, is not exactly the type of person that i want to build my empire around either. he's a good finisher with a moderately effective offensive game that's also a lockdown defender. really nice player that could be fantastic in a few years, but he's the type of person you throw next to steve nash and jason kidd and watch him morph into richard jefferson but better, not the guy you throw out there and expect him to get buckets for you nightly. sure, he'll do it for a while, but he's more of a complimentary than a franchise player. ironically, iverson could have been a good mate for him, but ivey grew up so much without anyone else viable on offense that he ignored what he had.

at this point, the upside for iggy is that he turns into scottie pippen. by that i mean that's his high cieling that he would have to practically take a helicopter to, but that's who he could become. maybe a pairing with kobe makes some degree of sense, but unless the lakers trade bynum and their next 1,000,000 first rounders i don't see anything like that happening.

as is, the 6ers will putter along at the bottom half of the atlantic and maybe score some high draft picks in the next few years, but with billy king running the show i have a feeling we'll see an extension along the lines of willie greens' before we see the 76ers win another atlantic division championship. more so than any other team, i think they're just boned.

If a homey's still moving, he's holding it down

Alright, I admit that the title of this post is quoting Lil' Wayne's fiery track "Georgia Bush". I also admit that "homey" was a completely different word in the track, a word that shouldn't be tossed around by whitey.

The subject of this post isn't the revitalization of N.O., nor is it something about the durrrty in general. No, Lamar throws his gaze to Phila, where AI is currently keeping it real as shit. A teenage was shot because he refused to give up his Answer jersey to a group of ruffians, and now Answer is paying for his funeral. Among all the things A.I. has done in his career, this is without a doubt the most noble and selfless. Well, duh.

We've talked about Iverson before, but in the context of Team USA and their doctrine of dominance. Now, his relationship to the Lig at large is examined.

I've never enjoyed watching Allen Iverson. Perhaps it's the Finals appearance against my beloved Lakers in 2001, or maybe I harbor some latent feelings of supressed racism, but his game is generally without aesthetic merits as far as I'm concerned.

That does not mean that he is without import to the Lig. Entirely the opposite--because he makes whitey so uncomfortable by fearlessly repping his thug/gangsta image, he is demonized in whatever he does. The conventional wisdom is that he doesn't share the ball enough because he's too "street," or that he hot-dogs too much for his own damn good.
One of those criticisms is perhaps true: for all his merits, Iverson didn't tend to share the ball around a whole lot until two years ago. But both deny the man's insane toughness and win-at-all-costs sensibility. Iverson should, by all rights, be revered by the Right Way NBA for his bulldog mentality. Dude tosses his 6'0"-and-skinny frame into the fires of war each and every time he rides onto the hardwood, but cannot shake the demonic marker that has been so cruelly placed upon his slender shoulders. No matter how hard he attacks the bucket, he will forever be regarded as a ballhog showoff who just happens to have played for some damn good basketball teams.

When Larry Brown, that paragon of righteous basketball, helmed the 76ers, Iverson was faced with a constant battle. Although Brown clearly acknowledged that Iverson could and should be the only scoring option on the team, there were mighty battles waged in the press between the two. Iverson's famous practice speach is just one small example of their ongoing struggle.

What cannot be ignored about their pairing is that it worked. Kinda. They made the damn Finals in 2001 with nothing beyond Iverson, Aaron McKie, and Dikembe Mutombo on either end of the floor. Iverson did nothing less than single-handedly win every game for the 76ers, dragging them by their struggling hair into some version of the promised land.

They fell short, and Larry was greeting with resounding praise for his fabulous job wringing success from what should have been a fruitless measure. The praise fell upon the wrong head. For all of his flaws, and they are many and multifarious, Iverson holds shit down on the offensive end. Sacrificing your body 82 games (and more) at a time is a measure that should not, by rights, be undertaken by an individual that could be described as shrimpy.

However, because of Answer's heart, lungs, and brains, he does that shit daily, with little help from any of his compatriots.

In Which the Relative Goodness or Badness of Each and Every NBA Player is Discussed

If a basketball player has made it to the NBA, he has proved something. Namely, he has proved that he has at least one skill that is applicable to basketball at the highest level.

So many teams make the mistake of correctly evaluating that a player is good (i.e. he belongs in the league) but do not understand the basis of his goodness. There are so many cases in point that it's downright hard to count them all, so we'll look at one man: Timothy Mark Thomas.

Drafted with the 7th pick of the 1997 draft, Thomas was drafted by the New Jersey Nets, who then flipped him to the Philadelphia 76ers. Based on what we know about draft order, 7th is very high (it is, in fact, Top 10). Because of that, we can assume that Thomas was oozing with potential. Now that we've established his potential, we must look at how it has been misused.

Long thought of as a "low-effort" guy, it is very possible that Tim Thomas never found the right system for himself. Even within the freewheeling Bucks offenses Thomas felt constricted and not used correctly.

He was then dealt to the Knicks, who spun him to the Bulls. The Bulls, who saw him as an overpaid basket case with an expiring contract, promptly mothballed him; he was instructed to stop showing up.

One of those organizations is a well-run one (Hint: it's not the Knicks).

That well-run organization ignored the meritous play of Thomas, by basically admitting that he had no use to them whatsoever. This is true-- Tim Thomas is a completely awful player. For the Bulls.

The Bulls granted him his release and he signed with the Suns, where he single-handedly carried them past the Lakers and into the Conference Finals. (Yes, he did carry the Suns past the Lakers, observe the 7/8 3-point performance in Game 1.) We can therefore assume that Thomas is a great player. For the Suns.

Very rarely is such a dichotomy observed in a single player within the scope of a single season.

(The only other that leaps to mind is Desagna Diop, who went from 1st round bust for the Cavs to dominant defensive force for the Mavs. Lesson: big Africans have their uses, always.)

However, the dichotomy wasn't a dichotomy so much as it was a realization of talent that was always there and recognized, but that had never been tapped by a team and system sufficiently equipped to tap it. Only in rare cases may a player flourish in any and all systems. For the vast majority of players, success is roughly equal to how intelligent the team is in their usage and role. Darko could not give the Pistons anything from his role as Left Out, but he can contribute shot blocking and outside scoring to the Magic, a team willing to overlook some of his flaws and love him for what he is: a big European who can stroke the J.