Free Ballin’

The Philadelphia 76ers fired GM Billy King on December 4^th, ending an era that never should have begun. During his tenure in the 76ers front office King endured criticism over the years for the trades he made, the contracts he offered, his draft choices—you know, all the stuff a GM does. Not even the AP article could resist taking shots at King on his way out noting, “King tried everything from changing coaches, making blockbuster trades and signing players to overpriced contracts to transform the Sixers back among the elite, but nothing worked.” The Philadelphia Enquirer tried to sum up his career in a compilation of “monumental moments” but I think it’s misleading to include all of these transactions in King’s “Reign”. GM or not, King didn’t run the 76ers until Larry Brown resigned as coach and VP of Basketball Operations at the end of the 02-03 season.

Though “Savior” wasn’t Larry Brown’s official title with the 76ers, the franchise hadn’t reached the playoffs since trading Charles Barkley after the 91–92 season, and Brown was brought in as a panacea with autonomy to build the team as he saw fit. Billy King was an assistant coach under Brown with the Indiana Pacers and Brown brought King with him to the 76ers. Though King and Brown were co-vice presidents with the 76ers, King was unquestionably subordinate to Brown. It’s an easy mistake to make. The 76ers forget sometimes, too. In Billy King’s official bio on the 76ers homepage he is called the “point man for all trades, player procurement, and negotiation of player contracts” and on the same site their history index states that after Brown and King were hired, “Brown began to reshape his team after the 1997 NBA Draft by acquiring veterans Eric Montross and Jimmy Jackson and draftees Tim Thomas and Anthony Parker in exchange for second overall pick Keith Van Horn and three expendable veterans.” This was probably the largest trade in NBA history where every single player involved failed to live up to their billing. Well except for “expendable veteran” Michael Cage who provided the Nets with no less than they expected as their tenth option. Regardless, this was Brown’s trade, the beginning of Brown’s era with the 76ers, and it was his team until he left. Therefore, I think it’s only fair to assess King’s stewardship of the team from ‘03-‘04.

And what a start! King began his true reign by acquiring Kyle Korver from the Nets for cash considerations and Korver quickly became a valuable shooter off the bench, and then umm…awful contract for Kenny Thomas…stupid Glenn Robinsons deal…oh, here’s one that always catches my eye, the stupid re-signing of Derrick Coleman to a big multi-year deal when (as I previously noted) every last person on earth new DC was only playing hard because it was a contract year. You can’t fairly blame him for what came before, but King really botched his first year as team President and kept right on botching things until he was fired.

Still, I think King gets more flak than he deserves, not just because he gets blamed for Brown’s moves, but also because people don’t give enough consideration to the difficult challenges he inherited from Brown. Brown didn’t bail on a championship contender; he left a team that needed rebuilding, and needed to be rebuilt around Allen Iverson, a star who drove Brown crazy—so he bailed. Now, Brown is known for bailing, but building around Iverson was no simple matter.

Iverson is unique in NBA history: a shooting-guard who’s undersized for a point-guard and can’t shoot, but still dominates. Iverson’s true value has been a popular debate topic for his whole career, but I tend to think it misses the point. He’s a brilliantly talented player who is so unusual that he requires unusual complimentary players. He’s a prize, but if you commit to Iverson, you have to commit to the personnel and tactical complications that come with him. Finding those unusual complimentary players is a tough job in itself, much less acquiring them and signing them to reasonable contracts. Eric Snow was far from a perfect compliment to Iverson. He didn’t provide the distance shooting that you want to couple with a great penetrator like Iverson, but Snow was a big point guard and an exceptional defender who could match up against the opponents’ scoring guards, who were too big for AI to guard. There aren’t many point-guards in the NBA who can defend shooting-guards or shooting guards who can comfortably run the point. And try finding someone that unusual who’s also comfortable and effective playing with a guy in who habitually dominates the ball for whole quarters at a time. Basically, you try to pair Iverson with a Chauncey Billups, but players of Billups’ ilk are uncommon and expensive.

Finding the extremely unusual backcourt mate is just the beginning to building around Iverson. And do you even build around a (then) 28 year-old player who relies on speed? If you can build a team that can contend in the following two or three years yes, otherwise, you blow up the team and sell your star while his value is still very high. But Iverson was the most popular Philadelphia athlete in decades and an unsurpassed crowd-pleaser, making him effectively untradable: his true value exceeded his performance and his performance exceeded the value and performance of what he would bring in a trade.

The way I see it, Billy King had no choice but to try and build around Iverson and he just wasn’t up to the task. He tried to hold on to what had worked with Snow and Coleman and didn’t seem to understand that it had worked because of Brown coaching Snow and contract-hungry Coleman. King traded left and right, trying to find the right combination to make the 76ers competitive again. Ironically, the best second-scorer fit I saw was Keith Van Horn, who spent the 02–03 season with the 76ers. But Van Horn was only one piece of the puzzle, and with three years and $43 million left on his contract, King decided Van Horn was a liability and traded him immediately for the older, also very-highly-paid Glenn Robinson, who was amazingly ill-suited to play with Iverson. I mean, black-hole, ball-dominating, king of the mid-range game Robinson? His scouting report more or less read: It’s best to avoid pairing Robinson with Allen Iverson. More irony? The best move King ever made was drafting Andre Iguodala in the 2004 draft, a steal as the 9^th pick. Iguodala didn’t match well with Iverson, and being 9 years younger and about one-seventh the price, it made a lot more sense to trade AI, blow the thing up, and start over. And that’s exactly what the 76ers have done. King just didn’t realize that the three-year rebuilding plan he had pitched and sold to ownership in the off-season didn’t include him.

Sticking with Iverson was the right plan. Billy King just didn’t know how to execute it. Once he botched the contention plan, blowing up the team and rebuilding around young players was the new right plan, and King had already started botching it badly by getting so little value in return for Iverson. What distinguishes King from some of the other panelists at Bill Simmons’ Atrocious GM Summit is that Kevin McHale, Jim Paxson and others had teams with instruction sheets that read: Contention in Just a Few Simple Steps! Classic just-don’t-screw-it-up jobs. Billy King was given a legitimately complex catch-22 project, which would have taken a top gun to accomplish. King didn’t have the chops, and loudly botched it, twice. He should have been fired when Larry Brown resigned

I’m sorry we had to watch Iverson play on such crappy teams, but I’ll miss King anyway; he made me laugh. He was never above taking the time to make the most bizarre little trades and still had the balls to play Russian roulette, with blanks.