Allen Iverson knows his baseline jumper and big step over the fallen Tyronn Lue in Game 1 of the 2001 NBA Finals is still delightful to Sixers fans 19 years later. While he doesn’t mind the play’s iconic status, Iverson wishes Lue, now the Clippers’ lead assistant coach and a reported candidate for the Sixers’ head coaching job, wasn’t the butt of so many jokes because of it.
He touched on the subject about four years ago and it apparently continues to irritate him.
“You know what’s so crazy? I don’t like it,” Iverson said on the All The Smoke podcast with Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes. “Because I love him. … He was giving me so many problems, man. He was harassing me — straight dog. He was harassing me so much. He was just on me so much. What’s so crazy, man, I don’t know how it happened. … When I stepped over him, it was like, I didn’t know I did it. And then they try to get me to mimic the s--- years later. I don’t even know how to do it.
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“I know y’all know, but just for everybody else that didn’t play, you don’t know when you’re going to do something. You don’t know the emotions in the game or what goes on throughout the game. It can be a coach that pisses you off, and then you react a certain way, basically telling him, ‘Ah ha, yeah … look what I did.’ You don’t know. So that moment, yeah, it was dope when you look back on it, but I just don’t like it. Like my homeboy one day made me so mad. … (Lue) was in the building and they had the pictures in the arena, and my homeboy (goes) to tell him to sign it. Man, I got so mad at him, I cussed him out so bad.”
As Iverson acknowledged, Lue was a pest on defense in that series. He’d bothered Iverson for a long stretch up until that overtime jumper.
“Seven straight points by Iverson,” you may recall Doug Collins saying on the NBC telecast. “Looked like he was dead in the water!”
Iverson, meanwhile, said on the podcast that he doesn’t see coaching in his future. He did praise his former coach Larry Brown and advocated for him having a role in the NBA.
NBA
The 45-year-old Iverson has been enjoying the action in the NBA’s quasi-bubble and named Kawhi Leonard, LeBron James, Jamal Murray, Donovan Mitchell, Jayson Tatum and Luka Doncic among his favorite players. Former Sixer Trey Burke also got some recognition for “getting busy” with the Mavs. Burke, who the Sixers waived in February, scored 31 points in Dallas’ first seeding game at Disney World and averaged 12.3 points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.0 assists in a first-round series loss to the Clippers.
Marcus Smart got a shoutout from Iverson, too. Iverson admires Smart, an All-Defensive First Team selection, because of "how he tough he is, and he reminds me of Eric Snow.”
Iverson covered a ton of ground on the podcast, which you can listen to below.