The Sixth Man

by Andre Iguodala

  That night I got to face Paul Pierce. I was already a big Paul Pierce fan, and playing against him only made me more so. I got to see up close what a genuine master he was. He had such a wide array of moves that it was almost impossible to predict what he was going to do. It was clear that his game was the result of consistent work and practice, and I really gained a tremendous amount of respect for him.

  Paul didn’t say a whole lot to me that first night, and I certainly wasn’t trying to get him going, so I kept it quiet for the most part. But he was one of the most devastating trash-talkers of all time. If you and he were battling, like really going blow for blow, he didn’t say much. And we had some truly great battles over our careers. But if you were weak and had the nerve to bark at him, he would make you live to regret it. He had this funny thing he did with lesser players who couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Because there are some guys who have to talk to get jacked up to play. Like I said, it’s competition, and whatever gets you going gets you going. And sometimes a young fella would strut off the bench and start, for whatever reason, talking trash to Paul Pierce. And Paul would say nothing. No response, no retort. At least not at first. Instead he’d wait until we were all gathered around the free throw line. And then when the game was quiet enough for you to hear someone slurping beer in the third row, he’d say at the top of his lungs, “Listen, if you don’t make more than ten million dollars, shut the fuck up. You can’t talk, bro.” There really was no coming back from that. Even your own teammates would be laughing and shaking their heads at you.

  My first NBA game was a success for me. We won by 2 points, and for my part, I played well. I knocked down my first couple of shots, even hit a three early on. I don’t think anyone on that floor expected me to shoot threes, but I got in the flow of the game early and just let it rip. I just wanted to win. I just wanted to prove I belonged. Somehow, I knew deep down that this wasn’t going to be one of those things where I’m here for a couple of days and then gone, telling someone ten years later at a barbecue how I once played a few games in the NBA. This was going to be a long journey. Despite all the fanfare, despite the Boston Garden, despite Paul Pierce, despite finally hearing my name called in an NBA game, despite everything, that first night to me was just business.

  Every night in that first season, I got a chance to play against someone new. That is the most tremendous part of your first season in the league. The first time I got to play against Shaq, I was awestruck. Or Yao Ming—it was amazing. And for me specifically, it was Rip Hamilton. I was a tremendous fan of his from his days at UConn. In a lot of ways, I was more of a college basketball fan growing up than an NBA fan, and I rooted for Rip when he won the championship with the Huskies. So when we played Detroit for the first time, I was kind of starstruck.

  “Yo, that’s Rip Hamilton,” I said to Allen Iverson. “His game is nice.”

  “Yeah, he’s much better than people think,” Allen replied. “An All-Star for sure.” Then he paused and looked at me. “But he breathes the same air you breathe.”

  This was something Allen said a lot if you ever got too starstruck. He would kind of joke with you about it: “This man breathes the same air you breathe.” That’s the way he saw things. You were to give your opponent respect, but not too much respect. “You’re a killer just like they’re a killer,” he would say. “So go out there and kill them.” And that’s the way I saw him handle himself. When he went out on the court, his whole goal was to show everybody that there’s nobody better, or even close to being better, than him. And that was every single night.

  He had a reputation. He had a lot of reputations. But there was no one ever like him. He played with a recklessness that I’ve never seen. He was driven in a way that very few guys are. You’ve got people like Kobe who are assassins. You’ve got people like Michael Jordan and LeBron who are crazy athletic and very determined. But Allen Iverson was pure motor, pure will. There was hunger to his game that you can have only if you come from where he came from. It wasn’t competitiveness or ego, although there was some of that. At the core, it was just pure, honest hunger and an absolute refusal to be intimidated.

  He also had a reputation as a ball hog, but what I actually saw playing with him was that he had to trust you. It was a sense, sometimes misplaced, of ownership he felt over the game. In his mind it wasn’t up to the coach or the scheme or the clipboard. When he was on the floor, he was in charge. He really had to believe you were good or else you weren’t getting the ball. It put a lot of pressure on the guys around him, because unless you were playing well, he figured that his chances of making the shot were better than yours, so he was keeping it. For him it was a pretty simple calculation.

  When I started playing with him, I would, on my off nights, read about him. I wanted to know a little bit about who he was and where he came from. Mostly I looked at a book called Only the Strong Survive, by Larry Platt. And really, Iverson’s Hall of Fame speech eventually said it all. Rats and roaches in the house. Sewage pipes busted, walking through shit and piss in his own house. This was a guy who came from some serious struggles, some life-or-death things, so he wasn’t someone you could bully by getting in his face on a basketball court. He simply did not give a fuck.

  But the thing that probably most people don’t understand about Allen Iverson is that he is wildly intelligent, incredibly quick-witted and multitalented. He was a cartoonist. He could draw you, a portrait of you, just out of memory. And he’d put a big bump on your head or draw you with a fat lip. He was always making everyone laugh. And he could rap. Like really rap. I know a lot of guys think they can flow, but Allen could really freestyle and pull verses out of thin air. He’d take a rap song and turn it into a country song just off the top of his head, and the whole bus would be singing along. He could make up choruses on the spot. He was never short with a joke, no one could outwit him, and he could throw a football like seventy yards. I’ve seen him do it. He had a stunning kind of charisma and an intense sense of self that people who played with him couldn’t help loving. He was just gifted in life. And that was on top of the insane things I witnessed him do on a court. It was like God gave him extra talent.

  I was always cool with our coach, Jim O’Brien. He was straight to the point and did things his own way. He was all about his own rules and philosophies of the game, and it was pretty much his way or no way. Overall this was a very good quality, especially for me as a rookie needing to learn the rules of the game at this level. Sometimes coaches will want to give their players freedom, which can be a good thing. But what sometimes ends up happening instead is that you have no idea if you’re making the right or wrong decisions, and you lack clarity on if what you’re doing is working and why. This can be difficult for a young player. But Jim, by contrast, valued clarity. He knew how you were supposed to run every play, and if you messed up, you knew exactly how and why you messed up.

  He was the first coach I ever met who was entirely obsessed with stats, well ahead of the rest of the league. He would know the statistical efficiency of every possible combination of players, and he spent hours poring over numbers and advanced metrics. It was impressive, and sometimes very useful. But there were times in which his consistency could get us into trouble. This is why guys gave him the nickname Half-a-Head. Because sometimes it seemed he could make decisions with only one side of his brain.

  We were playing at Toronto sometime in the last third of the season. Coach had cooked up a defensive scheme for us based on what he saw working statistically. And obviously you can’t defend the whole floor at once, so he made it clear to us that in this particular game, he was willing to give up a three-pointer from the left or right sideline. Not necessarily the corner, but a little farther out, around the twenty-four-foot mark, where they are much harder to make. He knew that this was statistically the most difficult place to shoot from and that this was this was going to give us the best chance of winning. Things were more or less
working according to plan for the first seven minutes or so, until Donyell Marshall came off the bench for the Raptors. Marshall had been something of a journeyman at that point, on his tenth year in the league and having played for more teams than I could count. He was never known as real shooter—his lifetime average from three was in the mid-30s, which O’Brien undoubtedly knew. We didn’t feel we had to overcommit defending him on the perimeter.

  We were wrong. Donyell and the coaching staff had clearly figured out where our sweet spot was, and a few minutes after checking in, he spotted up from that sideline and drained one. Thirty seconds later, he did it again. I just remember someone on our team—I don’t know who, might have been Michael Bradley—yelling, “Oh SHIT” as soon as he realized Marshall was open again. A few seconds later I hear “Oh SHIT” one more time, and Marshall is draining his third three from that very same spot. At this point it was clear that what O’Brien was doing wasn’t working. Donyell Marshall was forcing us to adjust. But Coach was having none of it. All that stat study meant that once he had a plan, he was sticking to it. There was simply not enough time to research another one. “It’s going to work,” he kept telling us. He figured that Donyell was just on a streak and would have to, sooner or later, regress to the mean.

  I guess if Donyell was going to regress to the mean, he wasn’t going to do it that night. He made shot after shot after shot after shot, all from the exact same spot on the floor. When it was all said and done, he had made an NBA record 12 threes in a game, which stood untouched for eleven years, until it was broken by my now teammate Steph Curry. Guys on our team were mad that night. We hated getting burned like that, but overall I can see where Coach was coming from. It was a statistical anomaly, and for the most part, Coach’s understanding of defense, informed by stats, was way ahead of where the league was at. He was an excellent first teacher for me.

  I got myself through those early years by trying to learn from my veterans. And we had some great ones on that team. There were guys like Aaron McKie and Kevin Ollie. They didn’t have the most talent, but they managed to be on their tenth, eleventh year in the league. That’s someone worth learning from, as far as I was concerned. We had Corliss Williamson. Corliss had just come from Detroit and showed me my first-ever championship ring. I could not believe how big it was! I still get chills thinking about it.

  I learned from some guys who were on the straight and narrow, and I learned from some guys who showed me what not to do. I remember one guy I played with, late one night after a game when we were approached by a fan. I could write a whole chapter about the crazy things fans do and say, but suffice it to say that while I’m grateful for them, they were not always easy to deal with. We’d get a lot of groupies, women approaching us, but it was more men than anything. So this particular night we were out, it was about 1:00 a.m., and we were approached by a fan who wanted a picture. And this player was like, “Why are you asking me for a picture? There’s all these women out here. Why you don’t ask one of them for a picture?” At the time it struck me as cruel and unnecessary. I mean, this guy was just trying to support our team. I made a decision that I would never be that way with fans. And to this day, I really haven’t been. But I have to say, as the years have passed, and I’ve been a part of some real media circuses . . . I can’t say I agree with that player’s behavior, but I understand it more now.

  That first season seemed to blow by. There was so much to absorb, so much to adjust to. We snuck into the playoffs as the seventh seed in the East and managed to win only one game against Detroit before being eliminated. It was not a great season for the team, but I felt I played well and stayed focused. I was back in the gym before the finals were over.

  Despite this, the real joy for me was always the guys I played with. Aaron McKie was one of my favorite teammates ever. When I got there, I started to try to figure out who’s who and what made these guys tick. And Aaron struck me immediately because he dressed well and carried himself with a certain stylish confidence. He used to wear these Prada loafers, not hard-bottomed but kind of a hybrid, dressy but sporty. And I always thought those really summed him up. On my first day on the team, he invited me to his house and I watched him play poker. It’s a great way to see how someone maneuvers, how someone splits the difference between where he was from and where he was going. Aaron was from Philadelphia, and while he stayed connected to his roots, he was also able to keep it professional. That street stuff didn’t really go on in his presence, and he made sure of that.

  Even though we played the same position, he was generous with advice. In the Eastern Conference alone, I had to guard LeBron, Paul Pierce, Vince Carter, Joe Johnson, Michael Redd—the list goes on. Aaron put me onto the game as far as the proper attitude to take into facing these guys. “Look,” he’d say, “they’re going to score. There’s a reason they score twenty-five points a game. You’re going to get bad calls on you. You’re a rookie—the refs aren’t going to let you reach in. Your job is just to make them work as hard as possible for those twenty-five points. If they score twenty-five but are exhausted at the end of the game, then you’ve done well.”

  Aaron taught me how to understand the bigger picture of guarding great players. You have to make them work. Some nights they’ll get the best of you no matter what you do. Other nights you’ll be able to slow them down somewhat. But the way Aaron explained it, the goal was never to shut them down every single game, because that would be impossible. What you were really trying to do was to build a reputation for yourself. You were trying to make it so that after a while, everyone coming to face you knew that you were going to give them trouble.

  This is one of the areas where the 76ers organization excelled in my first year. We had a great front office with great scouts. Early in the season, Frank and T.J. Zanin (they were brothers) were scouts for our team, and they gave me a DVD of the top small forwards in the league: Paul Pierce, Richard Jefferson, Tracy McGrady, Vince Carter, and Carmelo Anthony. It was just forty-five minutes of all their moves. I watched it religiously, pretty much every day. I was told to work on those moves, and I probably emulated Paul Pierce the most. Back then a lot of the game was about working on isolations: you’d find your sweet spot on the block and go into your set. If you watch old Carmelo tapes, you’ll see he was a master at this. So I’d watch for hours and then do their exact moves in my workouts. I wanted to get the choreography in my body so that offensively I could perform it naturally, and defensively I could guard against it instinctively.

  After a while, the game begins to make sense. Every team in the East was more or less working off the same framework, and so really you’d have to learn just the variations. And you wanted to pick up on it quickly because if you didn’t, they wouldn’t hesitate to find someone who would. I watched a lot of film. Sometimes I’d watch nearly the whole game all over again before the next date, to figure out what I did right, what I could do better. I got used to approaching things that way, with a certain amount of thought and care, and I first learned that in Philly.

  Another guy I loved playing with was Samuel Dalembert. Sammy D was funny. We were teammates for many years, and he was a unique dude. He was a good basketball player, and as one of the best shot blockers in the league, he was able to earn himself a pretty nice payday. But he had one of those minds that was hard to focus. Kind of a genius type. He was Haitian, grew up in Canada, and was fluent in a couple of languages. I always got the sense that he ended up in basketball because of his height. Like if he was six-two he probably would have been a math professor somewhere. That’s not to say he wasn’t good. He had a nice jumper, was a very good shot blocker, could run like a deer. But he had a host of other interests. Unlike a lot of guys, basketball wasn’t his life.

  One of the craziest things about Sammy D is that he could make computers—from scratch. He was the only NBA player I ever knew who could do that. And we got pretty close over time, so at some point I needed a laptop and I
was looking online trying to find one. I asked Sammy for his expert opinion. He was offended. “Man, don’t do that! They’ll charge you a bunch of money for software and a lot of shit you don’t need. I can build you your own personal computer for half that.”

  That sounded good to me, so I told him I was with it. A few weeks later, Sammy unveils my machine. A beautiful computer that had everything I needed on it. It was decent. A year goes by, I’m on a flight, I open up the computer, and the thing just crashes. Like expires. Corrupt software, all kinds of nonsensical messages.

  I go back to Sam like, “Sam, what is this about the computer, man, what happened?”

  He’s like, “Oh, the software expired.”

  “What do mean expired?”

  “Yeah, it was a free trial for twelve months.”

  “What? Man, I could have just bought a new computer for all this trouble!”

  This guy got me a computer with bootleg software and acted like it was all legit.

  But it was hard to be mad at Sam. He was very easygoing, always smiling, always laughing. People used to criticize him for not taking anything seriously, not having a killer instinct, but you have to look at where he came from. His beginnings were very humble, and he made it all the way to the NBA. If I were in his shoes I’d be smiling and joking too.

  Then there was Willie Green. Willie ended up as one of my coaches at Golden State, but back then he was what you’d call a pro’s pro. He learned the game from Kevin Ollie and I learned a lot of it from him. Willie Green was very clear about the things you need to do to stay in the NBA. At six-three, he was in a tough spot as an undersized shooting guard. To compensate, he played hard every day, every practice, every game. If he had to break your leg to get minutes, he would. But he did it respectfully, as funny as it sounds. He would tell you, “I’m going at you today.” And you knew what that meant. Willie would elbow you in the mouth and just look at you like, “Sorry, man. I gotta eat.” It didn’t matter that he was your teammate, Willie would straight up take your lunch money. Nonetheless, I always respected him. He made the most of his talent, because he could have easily been the kind of player who’d be in the league for two or three years tops. But he got over a decade out of himself and he built a reputation as a player who did not fool around. If you messed up, he’d tell you straight to your face.