IT IS DIFFICULT to grasp the full tragedy of the Allen Iverson trade. The Answer was only the second player in the history of the NBA to be put on the trade block while leading the league in scoring. And the Sixers did not really “trade” Iverson. They held a fire sale.
Which is merely bad news. What renders the Iverson affair tragic is that the characters seemed to be moved, against their own best intentions, by some great cosmic force. Indeed, only three other trades in basketball history approach the coming Iverson deal in terms of their destructiveness. All three occurred in Philadelphia.
The most famous is the Debacle of 1992, in which the Sixers sent Charles Barkley to Phoenix in exchange for the miniature shooting guard Jeff Hornacek and 2 other nominal players. The following season, Barkley was the league’s most valuable player; he led the Suns to the NBA Finals. Hornacek spent 2 years in Philadelphia, averaging just about 18 points per game. After the Barkley trade–as the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Bob Ford noted recently–the Sixers averaged 25 wins over the next 7 seasons.
In 1986, the Sixers were on the losing end of another fiasco when they traded Moses Malone (and two first-round draft picks!) to Washington for Jeff Ruland and Cliff Robinson. The following season, Malone averaged 28.3 points and 13.2 rebounds per game for Washington. He would go on to three more All-Star games. Robinson averaged 14.8 points in his first season with the Sixers and was gone after three seasons. Ruland played a total of five games for Philadelphia before retiring.
And then there was 1968. For 3 1/2 seasons in the late 1960s, the 76ers employed the greatest basketball player of his time: Wilt Chamberlain. He was not at his peak–he averaged a mere 27.3 points, 24.2 rebounds, and 7.2 assists per game during his three full seasons in Philadelphia. But in 1968, the Sixers traded this woeful underachiever to the Los Angeles Lakers for Jerry Chambers, Archie Clark and Darrall Imhoff. Chambers never played a game for the Sixers. Clark and Imhoff spent a few uninspiring seasons in Philadelphia. Chamberlain brought the Lakers to the NBA Finals four out of the next five seasons.
If you squint just right, you can almost see the grim, wispy fingers of fate reaching down from the heavens, pushing the players this way and that. All of the actors want to succeed. Harold Katz and Pat Croce and Billy King and all the rest wanted desperately to help the franchise. That very desperation made them prone to disastrous errors, such as drafting Shawn Bradley and trading for, in rapid succession, Toni Kukoc, Keith Van Horn, Glenn Robinson and Chris Webber.
By the same token, the Sixers stars have been, to a man, lionhearted. Wilt, Moses, Barkley, Iverson: Few players can match their intensity and grit.
The entire dramatis personae–owners, GMs, coaches, players–wanted to win more than anything else. Then again, all Macbeth wanted was to be a good soldier for King Duncan. Cosmic forces can warp even the best of intentions.
Iverson deserves praise and admiration. Don’t be fooled by the tattoos and the entourage; he’s a throwback to an era when players dove for loose balls, fought through picks, and stoically absorbed brutal physical punishment.
For 11 seasons, Iverson labored to swim against the tides of fate, struggling to lift the Sixers to glory; he nearly did. Perhaps this ignominious send-off is his payment for trying to upset the natural order; it is the cheek-cracking, oak-cleaving storm that besets Lear. Now he will be added to the list of names signifying noble, doomed failure: Mitch Williams, Ron Hextall, Eric Lindros, Randall Cunningham, Smarty Jones. Each is shorthand for a specific sort of metaphysical misery.
If there is comfort to be found in Iverson’s departure, it is that the story of the 76ers is only part of the larger tragedy of Philadelphia sports, the legend of which has grown so powerful that the rest of the nation now routinely rubbernecks at its tribulations.
For romantic souls, there is only one possible explanation for the way Philadelphia has become manacled in sports misery: Philadelphians are the last remaining tribe in America who believe sport is serious. Everywhere else, sports have devolved into disposable entertainment product. But we cling to the belief that athletics still means something, that sport is an important part of the human condition. When tragedy happens in Philadelphia sports, instead of shrugging and turning away, as they do in Washington or New York or Los Angeles, Philadelphians feel its sting.
And so fate, as fate will do, visits it upon them, again and again.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard and a weekly op-ed contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer. This essay originally appeared in the December 17, 2006 edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
