A.I.'s next tattoo should be a skull and crossbones
Dec. 10, 2006
By Gregg Doyel
CBS SportsLine.com National Columnist
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Allen Iverson is toxic. As far as team chemistry goes, he is the polonium 210 in the punch bowl. He will change addresses soon, from Philadelphia to whichever NBA team is foolish or desperate enough to trade for him. And almost immediately, that team's hair will fall out. Its organs will fail.

It will be beautiful.

Because Iverson deserves this. He deserves to go down in history as the Terrell Owens or Jeff George of his sport, someone whose immense physical gifts were never enough to make him or those around him happy. Iverson is among the most talented losers of all time.

But there is an NBA team that will mainline this venom into its veins and then wonder, in six days or six weeks or six months, what the hell happened to its health.

If Iverson were a coach, which would give him the freedom to change addresses on a whim, he'd be Larry Brown, the restless and selfish head case who goes from team to team like a locust, getting what he can in terms of money and adulation and then moving on to the next town, leaving behind an emotionally empty husk.

Yet there's always another team that will hire Larry Brown. Why? Because this is the NBA. It's run by the desperate and the stupid, handsomely paid knuckleheads willing to do anything to win a press conference or sell a ticket. How dumb is the NBA? Isiah Thomas has a great job with one of the sports world's cornerstone franchises. That's how dumb the NBA is.

Iverson fans are out there -- I'd feel better if you people would please not drive on the same streets as me -- and right now they are pointing to his scoring and his assists and his passion. They are saying: This is not a selfish guy. This is a team guy. He bleeds for his team. He sweats and cries and lives and dies for his team.

Iverson, they will point out, is averaging 7.3 assists this season and has averaged 6.1 for his career. How, his fans would like to know, can a guy average that many assists and still be considered selfish?

And the answer is obvious. Iverson dominates the ball. Hogs it. And in an NBA game, where possessions can last no more than 24 seconds, one of two things is going to happen: He's going to shoot, or he's going to have to give it up, whether from desperation or a sporadic show of conscience or whatever. And when he finally does give it up, his teammate is going to shoot. This is the NBA, you know. Everyone wants their shots, and if you're playing with Iverson, shots don't come very often.

And this being the NBA, the ball is going to go into the basket. So now then, do the math. Count the number of possessions in a game. Even with Iverson jacking up more shots than anyone in the league, more bad shots than anyone in the league, there are still plenty of assists out there for someone who hogs the ball.

Look at Gilbert Arenas. He averages 6.3 assists per game. I rest my case.

Iverson is selfish in games, and beyond. Who can forget his rant about the irrelevance of practice -- "we're talking about practice" -- or his inability to jell with any of the complementary players the 76ers have tried to pair with him. Keith Van Horn, Jerry Stackhouse, Chris Webber, Glenn Robinson ... the 76ers have done what they could to find someone Iverson could play nicely with. They failed.

Iverson has been with the 76ers since 1996, carving out a career that will see him score his 20,000th career point this season, at age 31. If he plays another five seasons and stays healthy, he will join Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain in the NBA's 30,000-point club. Iverson's 28.1-point career scoring average is third all time, a bucket behind Jordan and Chamberlain (30.1 each).

Still he's a loser. Iverson has spent a decade becoming a first-ballot Hall of Famer -- and in that decade his franchise is a grand total of 15 games below .500.

Iverson doesn't deserve all the blame. The 76ers haven't exactly had a Hall of Fame run of general managers or coaches in that time. But then again, Iverson dictates the success, or lack thereof, of everyone in the organization. The 76ers put the pieces around him. When those pieces fail, the 76ers try new pieces. And new pieces. And new pieces. At what point do we stop wondering about general manager Billy King's competence, and start pointing the finger at Iverson?

Luckily for King, Iverson won't be his problem for long. 76ers coach Maurice Cheeks, who played with superstars -- winning superstars like Moses Malone and Julius Erving -- has decided not to put up with Iverson's nonsense any longer. A trade will happen, and there's a sucker GM out there who will look at the statistics on the back of Iverson's trading card and overlook the corpses of past 76ers seasons.

The 76ers have died from an overdose of Allen Iverson, but there's a general manager out there who will seek that fatal high.