This started out with a facebook post.  My cousin told me I needed to write about Brandon Jennings and how he’d be the next Iverson – minus the attitude.  I’ll get to Jennings at some later date, but I need to talk about Iverson first.  You see, I’ve evolved from a first class Iverson-hater to full blown Iverson defender.  I’ve defended him in more arguments over the past year than I had in all the years before that combined.

So what’s happened over the past year or so that drove me to this position?  A whole lot of nonsense, that’s what.  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people who make mountains out of molehills and spin stories based on b.s.  If you believe the media now, you think Allen Iverson is a washed up egomaniac who should be willing to come off the bench for whoever will give him a job and be happy with 10 to 15 minutes of playing time backing up whoever the starting shooting guard is on that team, be it Kobe Bryant or Corey Brewer.

You’d also think that he was never that good to begin with, and is one of the worst people to ever play.  And oh yeah, he screwed up the Denver Nuggets while Chauncey Billups fixed them by replacing him.  I don’t buy any of that, and here’s why.

On count number one, he probably is an egomaniac, at least on the court.  Big deal, who at that level isn’t?  Michael Jordan?  Yeah, right.  Magic, Bird, Zeke, Kareem, Russell, Wilt, Kobe?  You think any of  them were humble on the court or in the locker room?  Let me answer that for you: HECK NO!  Is Iverson washed up?  We honestly don’t know yet.

His numbers were down last season, but his minutes were all over the place.  In 2007-08 he played 40-plus minutes 59 times, and 30-40 minutes another 21 games.  That’s 80 out of 82 games with at least 30 minutes of playing time, and three fourths of his games with 40-plus minutes of time.  Last season that changed drastically.  He played only 57 games for one thing.  And out of those 57 games, he played 40-plus minutes 26 times, about 50 percent of the time.  That’s a major shift in minutes, which means we’re making an apples and oranges comparison.  He’s 34 years old, so he’s obviously slower than he was ten years ago, or even three years ago.  But there’s a long way from slower but still effective to washed up, and we really don’t know how far that line he’s gone as of right now.

But wasn’t he the problem in Denver, and didn’t Chauncey Billups clean up his mess after he was gone?  Not really.  The Nuggets went from 50-32 in Iverson’s one and only full season there to 54-28 last season.  Their scoring went down from 110 to 104, and their points against improved from 107 to 100.  They also went from finishing four games out of first place in their division to tied for first place. And they went from losing in the first round to losing in the conference finals.

That’s improvement, sure, but that’s not the whole story.  The 2007-2008 Nuggets team played without Nene for all but 16 games, and his effectiveness was severely limited then.  Last year’s team had him for a full season and he averaged 14 points and 7 rebounds.  I’ll take Nene and Chris Andersen over Marcus Camby and no one else at the center position any day.  And what has gone unspoken is that Billups was terrible in conference finals against the Lakers; he had one good game in the entire six game series and shot under 40 percent in four out of six games.  I’ll admit that Billups probably some difference during the regular season, but in the playoffs he was  lackluster.  The Nuggets were helped last season by the fact that they didn’t have to play the Lakers in the first round.  Does anyone think that Chauncey Billups would have led them to victory if the brackets had worked out that way?

And finally I have to address the rap that Iverson gets as a person.  As we know, AI is unapologetic and without much of a filter.  If he think something is a bunch of b.s. he says so.  He called his coach in Detroit last year a liar, and no one on the team refuted it; Rip Hamilton quietly backed up his assessment in fact.  He’s always made it clear when he wasn’t happy with his situation and why.

And then there’s the infamous ‘practice’ rant he went on back in 2002, where he lit into reporters for asking him about missing practices more than they did about the actual games.  That rant will haunt him until he dies, and it’s all the fuel any Iverson hater needs to justify their disdain for him.  There’s also the tattoos, the cornrows, and the hip hop gear, the entourage, and the early off the court trouble.  His demeanor and look have always been of someone who’s going to play a game, not someone who is going to work.  Contrast that with the likes of Jordan and Magic, always wearing suits and looking serious, and there is a real difference.  Fine.  Iverson isn’t either of those guys; he sees people obsessing over things that have no importance to him, and he lets you know that those things don’t matter to him.  And we don’t like that, largely because we’ve invested so much in believing those things to be important.

But the fact of the matter is that he’s been targeted by the media almost from day one, because he wouldn’t conform and wouldn’t bend over backwards to give them quotes and friendly cliche-speak.  Now he’s paying for that because the media finally have the upper hand on him; with Lebron James having seemingly perfected the right mix between being serious about business and being down with the hip hop demographic, he now looks like a man without an excuse for how he carries himself.

And now that he’s no longer in the discussion for best player in the league, he can be marginalized with no repercussion.  Look, I’m not saying he’s without fault.  I don’t think it’s asking too much for the guy to put on khakis and a polo shirt, nor do I think it would have hurt to at least engage in some restraint when a mic was shoved in his face.

But I think it’s wrong for the media to have highlighted every negative thing about him, and to have spun some ‘who gives a crap?’ moments into big news, all while giving short shrift to the more positive things he’s done (llike the 2004 Olympics, when he was the most openly patriotic guy on the whole dame team) and to the people who vouch for him (Larry Brown, the coach who supposedly hated him so much in Philly, was willing to bring him to play for the Bobcats).  And I think that’s just wrong.