Allen Iverson checks in at No. 49 in ‘The Basketball 100’: ‘You could never question his heart’

“The Basketball 100” is the definitive ranking of the 100 greatest NBA players of all time from The Athletic’s team of award-winning writers and analysts, including veteran columnists David Aldridge and John Hollinger. This excerpt is reprinted from the book, which also features a foreword by Hall of Famer Charles Barkley.

“The Basketball 100” is available Nov. 26. Read David Aldridge’s introduction and all of the excerpts here.

Allen Iverson, in the most private of areas in the Spectrum Center, couldn’t help but get sentimental. A Charlotte resident, he went to check out a Hornets game against his former 76ers and ended up chilling with his GOAT.

Iverson and Michael Jordan. Having a drink or two. Reminiscing about their glory days.

Iverson is an icon. Still, it means something for him to be a peer of Jordan. So he was all in his feelings.

“Man, I love you, man,” he told Jordan.

But Iverson’s heartfelt declaration wasn’t reciprocated with the warmth he delivered. Instead, his love for Jordan was questioned — denied, even — by Air Jordan himself. Jordan’s reason for skepticism dated to March 12, 1997.

Iverson remembers the day. He still hears Bulls coach Phil Jackson shout “Michael!” from the bench and yell for Jordan to “get up on him!” And Jordan — he of seven first-team NBA All-Defensive selections at the time — crouched into his stance, determined to avoid the fate awaiting him. He stretched his arms out wide, positioning himself to force the ballhandler left. The Philadelphia crowd stood and applauded, recognizing this moment unfolding.

Iverson took the living legend to the streets. He jab-stepped left, leaned his whole body to sell the fake, and then crossed over to his right. It was a solid yank; quick, but hardly his most biting crossover. He wasn’t yet trying to get by Jordan. That was the tester, a sample to see how Jordan would react.

MJ bit hard, lunging to get in front of Iverson before he drove left. Jordan swiped his left hand at the ball once he realized it was just a jab step. By the time Jordan reset, again square in front of the ballhandler, Iverson was already setting up the kill move. He knew he had him.

Iverson slipped the ball between his legs back to his left. He paused for just a bit, lifting his torso as the ball spun beneath his left hand to create suspense about which way he’d go next. Then, suddenly, Iverson hit Jordan with another crossover. He leaned hard left and snatched the ball from out wide, whipping it back to his right hand. Jordan bit again, lunging in the wrong direction, hoping a swipe at the ball would save him.

It didn’t. This time Iverson dribbled into a rhythm pull-up jumper. Jordan, an elite defender, managed to contest the shot. But he was too late. Iverson drilled it from the right elbow over Jordan’s outstretched hand.

Jordan was now a victim of Iverson’s legendary crossover. That was all the proof Jordan needed to discredit Iverson’s love.

“He was like, ‘You don’t love me, you lil’ b—-,’ ” Iverson said, recalling the encounter in an appearance on the Club Shay Shay podcast.

It might be the greatest crossover in NBA history. Not because of the move, but because of its significance.

Iverson was a young buck testing his signature handle — and himself — against the idol whom he credits for inspiring him to play hoop. This was an opportunity to show he was worth the hype from his high school days, worth the No. 1 pick in a loaded draft, worth the anointing as a future NBA star. But Iverson wasn’t alone in that moment.

He had a legion with him. He had an entire culture behind him. His highlight against the game’s greatest signified his rise to the height of the game. It also came with the arrival of a demographic.

The impact of Iverson extended far beyond his feats on the court. There were plenty: 11-time All-Star, seven-time All-NBA selection, four-time scoring champion, two-time All-Star MVP, the 2000–2001 NBA MVP. But to understand the totality of his greatness, to comprehend just how significant Iverson is in basketball history, requires some sense of what he represented, the era in which he came along and what he inspired.

Iverson is hip-hop. Not in the sense of the music genre so prevalent in modern society, but hip-hop in the sense of the culture and its inhabitants. The same demographic that birthed the music as an expression of its largely oppressive experience. Iverson is an ambassador for this iteration of the ‘hood. He is a hero to a segment of the population systematically disregarded and disenfranchised that yet proved mighty enough to change the globe.

Picture a 15-year-old Stephen Curry. Baby face. Baggy jersey hanging on his skinny physique. Like any teenager, he wanted to look cool on the court. You know, look good, feel good, play good. So Curry imitated Iverson.

The armband. The finger sleeves. Now and then, the headband. He would’ve gotten cornrows if he could have.

“I tried,” Curry said. “I ain’t have that right hairstyle material.”

Iverson said he didn’t intend to make the sleeve a fashion piece. He wore it to address his elbow bursitis. But that was just the allure of Iverson. His whole aura was shaped by the culture of the inner city, and so he became a gravitational force for that culture.

Hip-hop is the rose that grew from the concrete of poverty and deprivation in the inner city. These largely Black and Brown communities were at the bottom of President Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economic plan, which deprived these neighborhoods of social programs and opportunities. The distress was intensified by the crack epidemic that ravaged these neighborhoods in the 1980s and ’90s.

Hip-hop became a vehicle of expression, self-actualization, and even community upliftment. The culture simultaneously cried out about the depraved conditions while also providing its participants with an escape from their harsh reality. It gave worth to millions of impoverished youth, creating entirely new paradigms of value, talent, and significance.

Iverson was so relatable because he took this essence with him to the top of the NBA. The style and creativity of his play mirrored hip-hop’s rebellious and self-defining sense of cool. And he was unabashed about letting the world know his origins. From the cornrows to the baggy clothes. From the fancy crossovers to the swagger on the court. From the jewelry to the entourage.

“His flair. His confidence. His uniqueness,” Curry said. “He represented culture on the basketball court and off. He was unashamed and unapologetic about who he was, even when the rules were almost set up for him to fail in the sense of how he ran his life. You want to make sure that he is celebrated. And I know this generation of players definitely … it’s probably unanimous how much of an impact AI had in some way, shape, or form on their game or their interest in basketball.”

One of Iverson’s signature moments as an icon was the 2001 commercial for his Reebok sneakers, the Answer V. It was so simple: black-and-white film, Iverson dribbling, Jadakiss rapping. But it was profound because Iverson was speaking in the language of his culture.

Iverson was often criticized for this allegiance. In 2005, then-NBA commissioner David Stern instituted a dress code that may as well have been the Iverson Rule, as it banned particular attire from players when showing up to arenas. Iverson said he met with Stern for about 30 minutes, dressed in a baggy baseball jersey and cap, and it felt like he was getting chastised for hours. He was deemed unprofessional, a blight on the industry, and an epicenter for the league’s issues.

“Allen Iverson brought an underrepresented element of Black cultural representation to the NBA,” said Ameer Loggins, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford who earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in African American Studies.

“He was aesthetically a 180-degree turn from the sea of bald heads that faithfully followed the lead of Jordan. While Blackness is not a monolith, Iverson’s brand of Black representation was absent from the NBA landscape before he arrived. Jordan was a jazz lounge. AI was a hip-hop club. He was what Huey Newton would have called ‘a brother from the block’ and history has shown us that those brothers from the block are framed as threats to status-quo America.”

The NBA, throughout its long history, has had these inflection points of revolution, and each had a face. Bill Russell was a significant figure in confronting the league’s race issues as those Celtics were pioneers in breaking the color barriers. The ABA and its merger with the NBA were vital in mainstreaming “Black” basketball — uptempo, creative, and athletic — with Julius “Dr. J” Erving as the poster child.

Magic Johnson and Larry Bird are credited with ushering in the modern era and carrying the NBA to major-sport status.

Jordan took it all to the level of insane profitability, mainstreaming the NBA to a degree it rubbed shoulders with pop culture. He appealed to Generation Xers and Millennials in urban centers across the nation with his flair and excellence.

Iverson would emerge from that midst.

And Iverson didn’t shed his natural skin when he made it. He resisted the prodding for him to disassociate from his culture. Instead he became an NBA superstar and planted a flag for the culture. He is one of the pioneers in society’s embrace of his people.

Jordan brought the NBA to hip-hop. Iverson brought hip-hop to the NBA.

For the millions who adored him, Iverson was representation. His battle against the status quo mirrored the struggle of his people. He made it possible for teenagers from the hood across the land to look at television, watch the NBA, and see themselves. Dominating.

That’s why his crossover on Jordan was so significant. So many had developed a kinship with Iverson on his journey, from his stardom at Bethel High in Hampton, Virginia, to the controversial arrest and harsh sentencing that nearly took him out, to the redemption opportunity at Georgetown under legend John Thompson, to the 30 points he dropped in his NBA debut.

For millions, they were crossing up Jordan too.

The power of that representation is exemplified in his cult status among his beloved fans and his NBA peers. Iverson was far from perfect, but he didn’t have to be. The people he represented were too distant from utopia to desire perfection. His flaws made him more tangible and familiar.

If there was a defining characteristic of Iverson, one that best represented the soil from which he sprouted, it was his toughness. Iverson’s play belied his size. Listed at 6 foot and 165 pounds, he looked thin and small compared to other NBA players. Yet his heart wasn’t frail.

“They say he was 6 feet,” LeBron James told ESPN years ago, “but AI was like 5-10 1/2. Do we even want to say 160? One seventy? Do we even want to give him that much weight? And he played like a 6-8 two-guard. … You could never question his heart. Ever. He gave it his all.”

Iverson was indeed an explosive athlete who compensated for his size with quickness and leaping ability. But he was still a lightweight. He stopped lifting weights in high school when he chose basketball over football, his first love.

Yet he carried the 76ers, even to the 2001 NBA Finals, where he scored 48 points to steal Game 1 from the Lakers’ dynasty. Iverson is fourth all-time in usage percentage and the smallest player in the top 20.

His toughness was evident in his willingness to attack the basket despite his diminutive frame. He took 6,182 attempts at the rim, 31 percent of his career total of shots. He made 57.3 percent of them. But for three years, capped with his 2001 NBA MVP, Iverson made two-thirds of his 1,342 attempts at the rim, including 70.4 percent in 1999–2000.

To understand the volume of Iverson’s driving, consider Dwyane Wade, who crafted a Hall of Fame career with his relentless attacking. Wade, who took 40 percent of his career shots at the rim, made 64.7 percent of his attempts. Wade has four inches on Iverson and some 60 pounds, yet Iverson averaged more attempts at the rim per game over his career (6.76) than Wade (6.73).

And those numbers don’t count the attempts not registered because Iverson drew a foul. He played 140 fewer regular-season games than Wade, but Iverson took 705 more free throws.

“His motor,” veteran referee Zach Zarba said in an interview with Ball Is Life, “his motor was like no other, and he continually kept going to the basket. And he would put it on you. He would make you either blow the whistle or not. He was not settling. At all.”

That trademark toughness was a by-product of his roots, a character trait connecting him to those from similar ilks. The people love him because they recognize that resilience. For many who cherish Iverson, it represents the perseverance they need to survive.

The society of Iverson’s youth rendered him an unredeemable thug and jailed him for it as a minor. But for his community, he was a well of potential and a symbol of hope worth fighting to save.

The NBA regarded him as a menacing stench on its product that needed sanitizing. But for his fans, he was imitable and wholly impressive.

Mainstream America saw him as a problem. But for his culture, he was always the Answer.

And his culture helped elevate the NBA to heights it never imagined.

Career NBA stats: G: 914, Pts.: 26.7, Reb.: 3.7, Ast.: 6.2, Win Shares: 99.0, PER: 20.9
Achievements: NBA MVP (’01), Rookie of the Year (’97), Seven-time All-NBA, 11-time All-Star, Hall of Fame (’16)

Excerpted from “The Basketball 100” published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photo: Jesse D. Garrabrant  / NBAE via Getty Images)