I don’t know what to make of Allen Iverson right now. He’s always been a unique personality; I never pretended to have a clue what he was thinking at any time before. With him, you just wait and see what happens. The same is true with this retirement situation. A lot of athletes, many of whose names are short yet difficult to pronounce, make it all but obvious that they secretly plan to un-retire. Other athletes, like Barry Sanders, walk away and never look back. I’d venture to say that basketball players come back much more often than football players, and either way, Iverson is somewhere in the middle on the retirement-confidence scale.
The fact is that for the past month – and in this letter, too – Iverson has emphatically repeated his conviction that he can still play. And if he can play, is it such a leap that he’d want to start so badly? His methods are one thing, but there’s been nothing unreasonable about Iverson’s desires. So why release this announcement, why today? Why announce your “plans” to retire and not your actual retirement? Because he’s coming back. He wanted to play for Memphis, until they shoved him on the bench without telling him.
It’s a long season. There will be a team that needs a scorer, a team with an open starting spot, a team that needs to drum up some publicity, a team that just wants to see what will happen. They don’t want to deal with him personally? Come on, the champs just got Ron Artest. If you can play, you can play. And I don’t think we know about Iverson from playing 49% of the minutes in Detroit. Imagine putting him on this year’s Suns, where he could run and shoot to his heart’s content. It’d be the best passing backcourt in the NBA.
I’ve always liked Iverson as an iconoclast, a guy who came from a certain culture and was proud of it, not ashamed, even while everyone else thought he should “clean up.” It didn’t hurt that he had the sickest crossover in the game. I’m not going to say that he should absolutely be a starting player in the NBA, because I don’t know that. I do hope some team gives him a chance, and he takes it. A letter like that is semi-embarrassing to renege on, but the potential for greater glory ought to outweigh any other concerns. So come on NBA general managers, let’s get this thing done. I just want to see what happens.
Yeah, I agree. Honestly, based on what Iverson says in his letter, it seems like Iverson is retiring to salvage his pride more than anything else. He still thinks he can play, and if a team comes calling, it seems he fully intends on returning. But now, this way, he can sell it as “See guys? Here’s a team that wants me so bad they are trying to coax me out of retirement. Fine, I guess I’ll unretire.” Maybe it will start a trend. I’ll be looking forward to Calvin Booth’s retirement letter any day now.
You think he can still play, you said, but does it matter whether he starts or comes off the bench? What if he played 30 mpg for a team that’s weak at shooting guard? According to 82games, he was about a net average last year. I guess it depends on the options a team has, but I think he could start in the right situation.
Of course he can start. What he can’t be any more is the first offensive option for a winning team. It’s not clear he can adapt his game to be effective playing any other way. So the Memphis coach thought it would make sense for him to come off the bench, and be the first option while the bench players were in the game. If he had done that and been good at it, his minutes would have expanded. So it does matter whether he starts or comes off the bench, because coming off the bench he can be AI for 20 minutes a game, and I don’t think he can play any other way.