Is Trading the Answer the Answer?
Ever since Larry Brown left town (Philly, that is...he's since grown accustomed to short-term jobs), fans have wondered if their beloved Sixers could win a championship with Allen Iverson. As the team continued to slip further and further into the basement of the league, the wondering has turned into an oft-repeated clamoring for GM Billy King's head if he doesn't get rid of Iverson by such and such a date. As King failed time and time again to pull a trigger on a deal that would send Iverson packing, the ire of the fans died down because if the team can't win, they might as well enjoy watching one of the greatest players of our generation, if not all time, do his thing in their back yard. This offseason, it once again seems "certain" that AI will be traded, quite possibly to the archrival Celtics, and once again fans are pretending like it's what they've wanted all along. That sentiment was echoed in the local media yesterday, when David Aldridge spun his own version of the Declaration of Independence, with the Sixers playing the role of the revolutionary colonies and Iverson as the stifling mother country.

The shameless cheese in Aldridge's approach I can forgive, but casting Iverson as such an oppressor is unacceptable. It's been a while since I've cared deeply about Philadelphia pro basketball - I've been a casual Mavericks fan since before Nash left, and a longtime fan of the Malone-Stockton Utah Jazz - and I only paid special attention to the Sixers in the 2001 Finals run and for the five games that I had tickets to this year, but I know that Iverson has meant more to the Sixers than perhaps any other athlete to his team in Philly pro sports since the early days of Eric Lindros. Within two years of drafting Iverson in 1996, the Sixers were playoff contenders. The diminutive guard from Hampton, Va., has more fully embraced the rough-and-tumble, down-and-dirty attitude that Philadelphia fans want out of their athletes than anyone since the Broad Street Bullies. Up-and-coming superstar Dwayne Wade markets himself as the guy who got knocked down seven times and got up eight; that mentality is most completely lived by Iverson, who has never feared going in against bigger defenders if it meant getting the points. Is Iverson getting old and run-down? Sure; at thirty years old, he's lost more than a step. But that still puts him a step ahead of many defenders.

The Sixers cannot win a title with Allen Iverson on the team, this much I'll agree with. But it's not because Iverson is the problem, as Aldridge's article so smugly implies. Iverson is the kind of player that the "new" NBA - the one where the Suns and Mavericks are in title contention every year - should embrace. And Boston makes sense for him; in Paul Pierce and Iverson, the Celtics would have a formidable run-and-gun pairing. But tell me you don't want to see Iverson score his 20,000th career point in a Sixers' uniform. Tell me you don't want to see one of the three greatest Sixers of all time retire in Philadelphia, instead of making a stop here on his league wide farewell tour six years from now with the Celtics. Like I said, I don't care all that much about the Sixers, and even I would consider that a travesty.

Iverson may not be the Answer to the Sixers' problems anymore, but he is far from the cause of them. And that's why trading him is a bad idea.

Unless we get Delonte West out of the deal.