ScapeG.O.A.T.

I hear the Detroit car industry was doing great til he showed up too.

Pound for pound, Allen Iverson is arguably one of the greatest of all-time. If MJ is the NBA's Ali then A.I. is basketball's Answer to Roy Jones Jr. Don't let this blame game that ESPN loves to play with controversial athletes (T.O.) fool you. Does it take time to adjust to a scoring talent like A.I.? Hell yeah, but before you go pointing fingers at the man, realize that Joe Dumars, probably the best G.M. in the game right now, made a change for a reason. He saw a franchise that was in need of a overhaul and pulled out the tried and true V-6 engine(Billups) and dropped in the aged but still quick as hell V-8 5.0 in Detroit's favorite muscle car. Of course there are still some nuts (Rasheed) and bolts (McDyess) that still need to be tightened. Besides, lets be honest, if this was anyone else who had put up the same kind of numbers over their career and single handily drug a semi-talented team to the finals while earning the MVP, would they be subjected to this kind of scrutiny?

This is the man who came in 96 and changed the game, but stayed the same. Until A.I., a lot of young cats were afraid to truly embrace the urban community and the hip-hop culture that originates from there. There where too many endorsement opportunities whose target market was middle and upper class white America to be tatted up and have cornrows in the L. Not for Bubba Chuck. Those same white kids were the ones buying Reebok t-shirts with tattoos printed on them and shoes with a portrait of a rowed up A.I. on them by the boatload. If you google "keeping it real" Ivey's picture should pop up on your monitor. He paved the way for guys like LeBron, Melo and countless others to stray from the Jordan cookie cutter mold and still be the same guys from Akron and Baltimore and be marketable at the same time. A.I. flipped the script. Allen started this "be yourself" shit, and this is the thanks he gets?