Never The Answer

If being a great baseball player sold short because his team stinks is matter, Allen Iverson was anti-matter.

In baseball, insightful analysts recognize that no one player is responsible for his team's success or failure. The reason is obvious: he occupies one position on the field, one spot in the batting order, one slot in a five-man rotation. In a game that mostly aggregates individual performances, he's not one of the individuals in the match-up 80% of the time. (The same for football: for all the impact a quarterback has, he's got his helmet on the bench next to him most of the game.)

In hoops, one player can be on the court all game. He might have the ball in his hands half the time on offense. He can be the difference between mediocre and great, bad and very good, dismal and promising.

On the other hand, basketball, like football, is a sport of synergistic team performance. Every player's actions affects the team dynamic in a way that no shortstop can on a strikeout, walk, home run, grounder to third, fly ball to right, etc.

Which brings us to the case of Allen Iverson, perhaps the most over-rated player in NBA history. Iverson, who apparently retired today, was unquestionably an entertaining uber-talent. But even at the peak of his nearly-transcendant skills, he was a drain on his teams.

New basketball analysis, fired by the imaginations that gave us sabermetrics in baseball, recognizes that it's not so much about how many points you score, but how efficiently your team scores them when you are contributing. Because Iverson's monopoly of the ball cast a shadow on the rest of his team, it was particularly significant that he sucked up so many possessions to score his 30-points-a-game. If the guy with the rock isn't maximizing the value of his teammates, he's diminishing the team, not enhancing it.

Iverson's supporters would point out that he accumulated assists like they were illegitimate children. That's a valid point, but again, he needed nearly all the teams' possessions to do so. His assist efficiency was low, crowding out the rest of the team's opportunities to create assist situations. On top of that, Iverson treated defense like it was...practice.

I don't believe it's a coincidence that in his one year of "college" -- (from what I understand, he never attended any classes) -- Georgetown flamed out in the playoffs despite a roster of NBA players, or that his Olympic squad's participation was a debacle, or that none of his NBA teams won a title, and only one accomplished much of anything.

All during Iverson's career, I argued that I wouldn't want him on my team. It wasn't the ghetto attitude, the disdain of practice, the ball-hawking, the tatoos, the injuries or the off-court dysfunctions that put me off, per se. Allen Iverson could only function as the center of his team's universe -- as his late career vividly demonstrated -- but building a team around him was a guarantee of failure, or limited success anyway. A mix of hard-working  players who share the ball, know their roles, and play together to score, rebound, get to the stripe and defend is a much more potent formula.

This stands in stark contrast to the misguided argument that one baseball player (or football or hockey player) is superior to another because of his ring count. There's plenty of information documenting all this, if you care enough to know.

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