When Allen Iverson said he would like to join the 76ers’ front office at the end of last season, it seems like he was being serious.
“I want to be in that war room, man,” Iverson said on a Sixers telecast last March. “Even if they don’t go with my decision or whatever, just to have an opinion and putting out what I think.”
It turns out, according to The Inquirer’s Mike Sielski, that Larry Brown has made more than one phone call to the Sixers’ organization to recommend his former star guard. In fact, he’s spent months lobbying the hiring of him to become an Assistant General Manager. He has done so to David Blitzer, a part owner of the team, in conjunction with Iverson’s manager, Gary Moore. Brown apparently has a relationship with Blitzer, saying on 94WIP a few months ago, “I like David Blitzer a lot, I know him.”
Here’s Sielski with the details of Browns’ pleas:
“Through the team's part-owner David Blitzer and Iverson's longtime manager Gary Moore, Brown has spent months lobbying the 76ers to hire Iverson as an assistant general manager. It would be a terrible move, treating an NBA franchise as if it were a halfway house where Iverson could put the broken pieces of his life together again. But Brown has pushed it anyway, in the hope of accomplishing an improbable goal: saving Iverson from himself.
"I just wish there was some way that he could be involved," Brown said in a telephone interview Friday. "Just teach him about the organization and let him figure it out, figure out how he can help. He can certainly judge talent. He certainly has people's respect. Kids will listen to anything he said. He's certainly bright as hell.”
Brown starts out sounding reasonable, like a concerned friend rooting for him to get back on his feet. But he quickly crosses the line of ridiculousness when he calls him “bright as hell”. Everything else he said may be true, and I’d fully expect a basketball team would have been engaged the second he began talking, but no one will ever confuse Iverson, who has been rumored to blow his fortune, as “bright”.
More to the main point, hiring Iverson would be like mixing water and oil. General Manager Sam Hinkie, who would be the boss of Iverson in this hypothetical, has shown through his two years here that he is calculated, patient, decisive. Iverson could not be further from any of those. But that may be why Brown wants Iverson in the organization, he would be something different from what they are doing. Brown has not made his opinion of Sam Hinkie unknown, as he has often pled for more “basketball people”. Connecting the dots, it would seem this may be a motive, along with wanting Iverson to have a steady job, for the many calls to Blitzer.
It is funny to imagine Hinkie and Iverson arguing about a player in the war room, however.
