The Answer is The Answer

With the Philadelphia 76ers retiring Allen Iverson's number 3 jersey into their rafters the other night, it got me to pondering:

In my basketball-watching lifetime, who has been the most influential player of my generation?

Hint: If your immediate response wasn't Allen Iverson, your skills of observation and deduction need polishing.

Mind you, "pondering" is not in my nature. And I am very stubborn about two basketball items: First, that Michael Jordan is the best, most important basketball player ever. I'm not going to defend that now, nor do I feel the need to defend it, but I know exactly what the opposition will say and I will not disagree with any of it. But it will not change my mind. Second, Kobe Bryant has been the best basketball player in the world since Jordan. LeBron James is the best right now, and has been for the last year or two, but that's it. Again, I know what the other side will say, but those points I WILL disagree with. Just not now.

Moving on. Kind of.

If your definition of moving on is talking about the very thing 

you just said you weren't going to talk about.

Iverson influenced the game in a similar way to Jordan in that he changed the way the game looked. Before Jordan, the league was dominated with short shorts and fundamentals like running, passing and shooting. Take my word for it, that's not quite what the game is about anymore. Julius Erving may have been the breakthrough for playing above the rim, but Jordan took it to another level. Dunking, or at least flying through the air and attacking the rim, went from being an occasional occurrence to a way of life. Posterizing wasn't a thing until Jordan started doing it to everyone. The way the game was played underwent a drastic, fundamental change that resonates harder today than it ever had previously. He also took the game global. There's a reason the 1992 Dream Team was so successful, and (no offense) it wasn't because of Charles Barkley and David Robinson, or even Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. It was because the entire world knew who Michael Jordan was. Gatorade and Nike (and Hanes, for that matter) would not have the market share they do without Jordan's involvement. He single-handedly, no exaggeration, turned both companies into the hands-down leading brands in their respective fields. Because of how he played the game. And players started wearing baggier shorts. Thank God for Michael Jordan.

If I just alienated the demographic of people reading this who supported this look,
I am not sorry. Not even a little.

Did Iverson, then, take the game to another level? Do other solar systems rep his jersey and buy his shoes? No. But how often do guys in pickup games across the country get clowned for getting their ankles broken by a nasty crossover? More importantly, how many small-ish dudes attack the basket with full force and little fear? The answers are very often, and more and more every day, respectively. The reason for those answers is The Answer.

Did you know there was a band called The Answer? Me neither. Now this is confusing.

Of the 50 players with the most free throw attempts per game all-time, only 5 of them are under 6'4". Jerry West and World B. Free were 6'2", Lenny Wilkens and Nate "Tiny" Archibald were 6'1", and Iverson was 6'0". There's a reason the other 45 players on the list are bigger, and that's because getting to the free throw line requires getting fouled, and getting fouled usually involves being close to the basket, and being close to the basket usually involves running into very large people, and running into very large people is something usually only other very large people can sustain for a long enough time to rack up all those free throw attempts. To this point in the 2013-2014 season, you only have to go through the top 20 to find 7 players under 6'4", and 2 of them are under 6 feet. Last year 5 of the top 20 fit the under-6'4" demographic. If you go back to early in Iverson's career (as far back for these stats as I could find), in the 1999/2000 season, the only such players in the top 40 were Iverson, Stephon "Starbury" Marbury and Sam Cassell. Iverson's determination to get to the hoop, take a pounding, pop right up and do the same process again the next time down the court became an inspiration to smaller basketball players all over the country. Plus, how cool does it look when short guys dunk? Especially in crowds and over big guys:

Note: The accompanying music is explicit, so mute the sound if that will bother you.

Do you think Nate Robinson would have been able to do any of this without the influence of watching Allen Iverson fly towards the rim over and over again? I don't think so. And that wasn't even Iverson's biggest contribution to the game.

The And1 Mixtape Tour (now referred to as the And1 Live Tour) began the streetball trend when it released its first mixtape in 1999. Featuring Skip 2 My Lou aka Rafer Alston, a future NBA player with a short-lived career, the mixtape became very popular and led to a quickly growing tour and fan base. Iconic players such as Hot Sauce and The Professor took off in name and image recognition, not because of their high-flying abilities, but because of their slick, chaotic ball-handling skills. All of the sudden, it became just as cool to embarrass somebody by breaking their ankles or dribbling circles around them as it was to dunk over them. It's no coincidence that Iverson's career started in 1996 and that his first All-Star game appearance was during the 1999-2000 season, the same year the first And1 mixtape came out. All it takes is watching these last 15 moves (skip to the 11:30 mark) to see where those guys probably got their inspiration from:

Then take a couple minutes to peruse this video of some of the other best crossovers over some recent span of time in the NBA:

How many of those look like they were before 2000? Very few. How many of them look like they were probably influenced by moves Iverson himself pulled off in the previous video? Almost all of them.

Did I want to grow up to be like Allen Iverson? No. To this day I've never really understood cornrows or guys wearing earrings. That's not a criticism; I don't understand running cross country or eating vanilla ice cream, either. But I digress. I'm 6'7", 225 lbs, slow, with no leaping ability. I'm Mike Dunleavy Jr. You laugh, but you wish you were an 11-year NBA veteran with a career averages of 12 points and 28 minutes per game. Where was I. Oh yeah. No, I didn't want to be Iverson, but I sure didn't mind watching him on a regular basis. It was like watching David versus Goliath, except every day there was a new Goliath, and every day David found a new way to beat him and embarrass him, all the while changing how people went about slaying giants. That's a thing, right?

Looking back on all of the sports I watched when I was younger, I realized that I missed the opportunity to really take in some phenomenal players. Allen Iverson is near the top of that list. Putting some of his numerous off-court troubles aside, Iverson was one of the most dynamic, compelling characters the NBA ever put on the court, and he left a lasting impact on the game that will not fade soon. His presence will be missed.

An article about Iverson would be incomplete without referencing his "practice" habits, so here you go: