Monday, November 3, 2008 Joe D swings for the fences
Make no mistake about it: This is Joe D’s home run swing.
Even he would admit that trading Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson isn’t the slam dunk that getting Rasheed Wallace five seasons ago represented. That deal cost him nothing of his present and not much more than that of his future, two late first-round picks.
This one cost him an All-Star point guard and the team’s captain for a cold-blooded scorer who’ll be a no-brainer first-ballot Hall of Famer. Antonio McDyess was thrown into the mix to make it work for cap purposes, though McDyess told me two years ago and reiterated last season that he would retire first if it meant leaving the Pistons.
Billups was integral to those six straight trips to the Eastern Conference finals and there’s no question the chemistry changes without him.
But also make no mistake about this: At its optimum – if this trade works the way Joe Dumars and Michael Curry envision it – adding Iverson to this team gooses the product and increases its possibilities to the same magnitude that adding Wallace to the 2004 Pistons did.
“He embodies a lot of what Joe has established here over a long period of time,” Pistons vice president Scott Perry said. “He’s a fierce competitor, he’s going to bring tremendous energy to our basketball team and he’s a proven All-Star in this league. He’ll add excitement not only to our basketball team, but to the community at large.”
Joe D looks for three things in players: talent, obviously; strong desire to win; and good character. Iverson is off the charts in the first two categories. Some would argue the third, but Iverson’s issues have been almost exclusively personality clashes with strong-willed coaches.
On that score, Joe D is perfectly comfortable banking on Michael Curry – on the instant respect Curry commands and on his first-time head coach’s acute communications skills.
Prediction: Curry and Iverson will connect like Iverson hasn’t with any coach dating back to John Thompson at Georgetown. Whatever the best of Allen Iverson at 33 might be, the Pistons are going to see it.
Iverson gives the Pistons one of the most irrepressible scorers in the NBA. In the lonely moments of the playoffs, when offenses inevitably bog down, players who can create their own shots – no matter what play is called, no matter what defense is deployed – are invaluable.
Think about the running-in-mud Pistons offenses of critical junctures of the last three playoff exits – in 2006 against both Cleveland and Miami, in 2007 again against the Cavs, in 2008 at times against Boston – and now imagine Iverson in the mix.
If there was a general sense that the Pistons had been passed by in the East – surely by Boston, maybe by Cleveland, with Philadelphia moving up fast on the outside, you should know that nobody inside the NBA had written off Detroit. But the hunch is that news of Iverson joining the Pistons is going to make them catch their breath in Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia and anywhere else they harbor title aspirations.
It’s going to take a while to see how Iverson fits in a backcourt with Rip Hamilton and Rodney Stuckey. Iverson’s recent coaches – Larry Brown, Mo Cheeks and George Karl – have felt Iverson works best playing off the ball and paired with a pass-first point guard like Eric Snow or Steve Blake.
Iverson and Hamilton will make for a dynamic scoring backcourt. But is there a playmaker? Well, Iverson has averaged better than six assists per game for his career. So we’ll see. Is it possible, even, that Curry would start Stuckey and Hamilton, then bring Iverson off the bench? I doubt it, but it bears consideration.
“You’re talking about a top-tier player,” Perry said. “He knows how to play with other good players and good players will figure out how to play with him. He’s a smart, intelligent player and you all know what his strengths are. He can score, but he’s much underrated as a player. We fully anticipate him fitting in quite well.”
At 33, there has been little evidence of slippage in Iverson. If he’s lost a half-step in his 12 seasons, that still leaves him a half-step ahead of the field. Whatever issues he’s had have stemmed from being a little too headstrong sometimes, but no one has ever questioned his toughness or desire to win.
And maybe Iverson at 33 – and playing for his next contract – plays to the Pistons’ advantage. Certainly, he hears the clock ticking on his career. Surely, he knows he’s never been blessed with such a talented cast of teammates. Inarguably, there is stability and leadership here like Iverson has never known in the NBA.
No one knew how it would work two years ago when Iverson was shipped to Denver from Philadelphia. They were saying some of the things then that are going to be said now – this is Iverson’s best chance, he’s never had a teammate like Carmelo Anthony, the change of scenery will do him good.
But the Denver and Detroit situations are pretty well separated. The Nuggets were a weak defensive team top-heavy with scorers but with little in the way of role players. Iverson and Anthony never really meshed, as if they were fighting their instincts to be the team’s dominant scorer for fear of stepping on the other’s toes.
The Pistons will make it pretty clear to Iverson that they covet him for his pure scoring ability. Though Hamilton has been the team’s leading scorer for six years, he gets his points within the context of the offense. Hamilton, in fact, might become a more efficient scorer paired with Iverson for the way Hamilton exploits defensive breakdowns – and nobody this side of Kobe or LeBron breaks down defenses as consistently as Iverson.
It wasn’t easy for Joe D to part ways with Billups. That 2004 NBA championship banner keeping company with the two No. 4 helped win with the Bad Boys never happens if Dumars doesn’t identify Billups as the point guard to run his team in the summer of 2002.
But Dumars has always been drawn to Iverson. The first major deal he attempted would have brought Iverson to Detroit in time for the 2000-01 season. It got shot down because Matt Geiger refused to waive a clause in his contract needed to close the loop on the trade. Iverson went on to win the MVP that year and took Larry Brown’s 76ers – there’s a healthy dose of irony in there somewhere – to the NBA Finals.
This deal was done with that – the NBA Finals – in mind, of course. Dumars doesn’t make this trade if he didn’t think it makes the Pistons a more formidable playoff team. But I doubt he does this deal if he thought it imperiled the Pistons’ future, either.
He knows Iverson is on the last year of his contract. Either things go extremely well and a happy Iverson signs on to continue his run as a Piston or the two parties split company at season’s end – in which case the Pistons have Rodney Stuckey as their point guard of the present and future and an enviable cap situation to facilitate another significant deal or allow the pursuit of a marquee free agent.
So this was Joe D’s home run swing, almost five months after he said it was his intention to shake things up. When no fireworks were ignited by the Fourth of July, a significant chunk of Pistons Nation grew restless.
But early July, when free agency opens and teams looking to remake themselves begin seriously exploring their options, is only the first pathway to a window of opportunity that doesn’t slam shut until late February.
All along, it made sense that better chances to recast the Pistons would present themselves once the dust settled and many of those teams that went into the summer with bold ambition wound up disappointed.
Denver, surely, was one of those teams. Which explains why Allen Iverson is on the verge of pulling on a Pistons uniform at the cost of Mr. Big Shot, Chauncey Billups. It’s the most significant personnel move the Pistons have undertaken in almost five years. And it carries the same potential to expand their possibilities as that deal for Rasheed Wallace did.
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