Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Krieger: Iverson preaches and the Nuggets listen

By Dave Krieger, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 24, 2007 at midnight

Text size  

More Sports Columns & Blogs

More stories »

SAN ANTONIO - Ask Allen Iverson to name the best leaders he has known in the NBA and he summons three candidates from his best team, the Sixers that reached the Finals in 2001.

"Larry Brown, Aaron McKie, Eric Snow," he told me Monday, a little more than 12 hours after dominating the fourth quarter in the Nuggets' Game 1 victory over the Spurs. "As far as the greatest leaders I've been around, that would definitely be my top three.

"They were good at keeping the team together, making us understand that it was all about a team and that we couldn't accomplish anything without each other. That's the biggest thing, just making everybody buy into the fact that one or two men wouldn't be able to accomplish what we were trying to accomplish. It would take the whole team."

Through 11 brilliant seasons without a championship, this is the hard lesson Iverson has learned. It doesn't matter how good he is. It doesn't matter how much he scores. He can't get where he wants to go by himself.

He and Brown butted heads for years in Philly, Brown trying to deliver exactly that message - play the right way - to a brash basketball prodigy determined to play his own way. At 31, Iverson now carries Brown's message with the zeal of a religious convert.

"Allen won every individual award you can think of and he truly does want to achieve something with the team," said Nuggets vice president of player personnel Rex Chapman, who has known Iverson for more than a decade. "I firmly believe that."

This has been Iverson's mantra from the moment he stepped off the plane from Philadelphia in December. If you've followed his career, nothing he's done on the basketball court since then has surprised you. But if you recall his pitched battles with Brown, you might be amazed at his conversion off it.

From the first day, he has preached teamwork and defense, to the point that younger teammates began to imitate him, as if following a fad. Where once Marcus Camby was alone advocating these values, it is now a chorus.

"He leads by example out there on the court by how hard he works," Carmelo Anthony said. "And I think when everybody sees that, we automatically follow."

But when did one of the NBA's most famous rebels make the turn to team leader?

"I guess after I didn't have those people anymore," he said of his former Sixers crew. "Not having them around, I wanted to have that as part of the team because I felt like that would be something we would need."

Iverson remains an artist on the basketball floor. Two months shy of his 32nd birthday, he played every moment of the second half in Game 1, willing the Nuggets to victory.

It was team defense by a team known for matador defense and Iverson's clutch scoring that sealed the win. To listen to Anthony talk up defense is to understand Iverson's profound effect on this team.

"I've never been a verbal leader," Iverson said. "I always tried to lead by example, go out and play hard every night, show my teammates that I would give everything I got for 45 minutes. But now I feel like with the circumstance and the team that we have, I'm more of a verbal leader.

"I know we've got leaders on this team already. Melo's words mean a lot. Marcus Camby's words mean a lot. I just try to come and add something that this team never had. I try to be a warrior as far as what I've been through in my career and what I've learned, and try to just bring all the traits that I have to this team and instill it in them."

To put Iverson's maturation in context, I asked Chapman and George Karl, who have more than 50 years of NBA experience between them, to name another player who has made a similar transformation.

Neither could think of one.

Explaining how it happened for Iverson is easier. In fact, he explained it himself after the NBA All-Star Game in Denver two years ago when he talked about the influence of being a father.

"I think one thing you can point to is he's a married guy with four children," Chapman said. "Nothing will ground you like a marriage and young children. He's setting an example for his kids. He's very into his family."

Still, it requires a certain kind of humility, especially for a modern sports star, to admit his mistakes, as Iverson has, and convert so publicly to a new set of values.

"When he believes in something," Chapman said, "he believes in it the whole way."

Iverson the artist has always learned the hard way. That's how he learned about winning. Now he's an evangelist, passing it on while he still has a chance to reach the one goal that has eluded him.