- It's June 6th, 2001, Los Angeles, California.
Last minute of overtime in Game 1 of the NBA finals
between the reigning champion Lakers
and the Philadelphia 76ers.
L.A. is definitely gonna win this series.
Nobody in their right mind would predict otherwise.
But right now, Philly's up two points.
Allen Iverson has the ball
and the opportunity to all but decide this opening game
in favor of the underdog Sixers.
This moment has the potential
to transcend the overall series outcome in NBA history.
To fully understand why,
we need to trace the paths these people took to get here
and grasp the incredible unlikeliness
that they even made it this far.
Let's rewind.
(mystical music)
So these teams entered the playoffs with the same record
but they are not particularly alike.
This Lakers squad is an absolute buzzsaw.
Last season, they won a remarkable 67 regular season games,
then had to scratch and claw through close playoff series
to eventually win Kobe Bryant
and league MVP Shaquille O'Neal their first championship.
This year has been the inverse.
Even among rumors of a Shaq-Kobe feud,
L.A. won 56 games, great but not incredible,
but they finished the regular season
on an eight-game win streak
to clinch their division,
then just mercilessly plowed through playoff opponents.
They swept the Blazers, swept the Kings,
they even swept the one-seed Spurs
and at no point was any of this close.
They took those 11 straight playoff victories
by an average margin of 15 points.
Shaq has looked as dominant as ever.
So has Kobe.
And their supporting cast,
dudes like Derek Fisher, Rick Fox,
and the recently acquired Horace Grant,
has run coach Phil Jackson's triangle offense brilliantly.
Ask any expert and they'll pick the Lakers
to repeat as champions.
Same with the odds-makers.
As far as gambling is concerned,
L.A. is the most heavily-favored NBA finals team ever.
And they opened this Game 1
by reminding everyone why they're a historically safe bet.
Thanks large part to Fox's shooting
and Shaq's sheer force on the inside,
L.A. fired off a 16-0 run in the first quarter.
By now, O'Neal has a commanding 44 points,
which of course leaves one wondering
how the Sixers are winning the game.
Because, the Sixers?
They did not coast into this series like the Lakers did.
Far, far from it.
Just looking at this lineup on the floor gives you hints
of how much the Sixers have changed this season
and how many obstacles they've faced.
Let's start in the middle.
This is Dikembe Mutombo.
Four months ago, he wasn't a Sixer.
In February, Philadelphia was rolling.
They had the best record in the NBA
with an elite defense anchored by center Theo Ratliff
who had been selected alongside Allen Iverson
for the All Star game later that month.
But on February 7th, disaster struck.
In their last game before the All Star break,
Philly got smoked by Steve Francis and the Houston Rockets,
and worse, Ratliff aggravated a wrist injury
that was later shown to be a stress fracture.
It would require surgery and sideline him for quite a while.
Gunning for a number one seed and a deep playoff run,
the Sixers didn't have that kind of time.
And, as it happened, the miserable Atlanta Hawks
were ready to trade their star defensive center, Mutombo.
They didn't mind taking the injured Ratliff in return,
but demanded another key Sixer, Toni Kukoc,
to get a deal done.
It was a big swing for the Sixers to take,
and though Philly wasn't quite as dominant
after the All Star break,
Mutombo did win Defensive Player of the Year
and he's been a crucial part of this playoff run
right up through tonight.
It's not like Dikembe has slowed down Shaq.
Nobody does that.
But at the very least,
Mutombo walled off the rim to penetrators,
made Shaq work on the other end,
and put some good, hard playoff fouls on the big guy.
Five of them, in fact.
Guarding Shaq is frustrating.
But it'd be way tougher if the Sixers had just stood pat
with an injured Ratliff on their roster.
And we can't talk about injuries
without discussing these three guys,
each of whom is guarding Kobe Bryant tonight.
They've done a good job, too,
thanks in large part to Eric Snow's quick hands,
Aaron McKie's poise on the block,
and Raja Bell's fearless ball hawking,
Kobe has as many turnovers as baskets so far.
But it took a lot for any of these three guys
to end up on the floor right now.
The tough road the Sixers faced after the Ratliff injury
didn't end in the regular season.
During the second round of the playoffs against the Raptors,
key wing defender George Lynch
aggravated a fracture in his left foot.
He hasn't played since.
In the following round against the Bucks,
Snow, another lockdown defender, broke his foot,
fracturing the bone around the screw that had been
surgically implanted in his ankle months prior.
And, amazingly, yet another defensive specialist
broke his foot tonight.
It hasn't been diagnosed yet,
but when Sixth Man of the Year Aaron McKie
came up limping in the fourth quarter,
it was because of a chip fracture in his right ankle.
- [Announcer] McKie is struggling, you can see.
- So yeah, lots of broken feet
on the court and stuck on the sideline.
Oh, and Mutombo has a broken finger
he suffered in the conference finals,
and Iverson, we'll get to Iverson.
The point for now is these Sixers are absurdly wounded,
which explains why this guy is on the court at all.
Raja Bell is on the floor in crunch time of a finals game
and he is nobody.
Or, at least, he was nobody.
Bell went undrafted
out of Florida International University in 1999.
He spent a season with the Yakima SunKings of the CBA.
The Spurs signed him before this season
but played him literally zero minutes, then cut him.
Philly snagged Bell right before the playoffs
as injury insurance, and obviously,
they have needed injury insurance.
Tonight, he's been an instrumental part
of the brigade assigned to Kobe.
He's made some big plays in transition
and he pulled off this truly inspired feat of pivoting
to cut into a small Lakers lead a few minutes ago.
So I guess my point is this.
The playoffs have been so punishing
that the Sixers are trying to close out a finals game
with two broken feet, a broken finger,
a guy who started playing NBA basketball months ago,
and, well,
we'll get to Iverson's performance in the playoffs.
I first want to make clear
that Allen Iverson wasn't supposed to be here,
like, for any of this.
The fact that he's even on the team right now
has a lot to do with Matt Geiger.
Yes, Matt Geiger, the tall, bald dude
who comes off the bench behind Mutombo
and who has played some solid minutes tonight.
He splashed midrange jumpers
while Mutombo sat with foul trouble
before fouling out himself because,
like we've established,
guarding Shaq is pretty hard.
How is a random bench player crucial
to Iverson's continued presence in Philly?
Well, let's go back a year, summer 2000.
The Sixers were coming off kind of a fraught season,
with the main problem being continued conflict
between Iverson and Coach Larry Brown.
Iverson had drawn Brown's ire
and eventually a team suspension
by skipping practice and being late for practice.
It feels good for some reason to repeat that word like that.
Practice, practice.
What were we talking about?
Oh, right, we were talking about practice.
The coach-star relationship got so bad that,
by the off season,
all parties were openly questioning the future.
Iverson said continuing to play for Brown
would be extremely hard.
Brown mulled an offer to coach at his alma mater,
the University of North Carolina,
despite having just signed an extension in Philly.
And, after Brown ultimately passed on the UNC job,
the Sixers moved to get rid of Iverson.
They didn't just come close to making that decision.
They made it.
Sixers owner Pat Croce engineered a complex four-team trade.
According to reports,
it would have sent Iverson and Geiger to Detroit,
Jerry Stackhouse, Christian Laettner,
and Travis Knight to Charlotte,
and Anthony Mason, Todd Fuller,
and Philly's Kukoc to the Lakers.
For surrendering their superstar,
Philly would have come away with Eddie Jones,
Glen Rice, Jerome Williams, and Dale Ellis.
The deal was close enough to done
that Croce called Iverson to let him know.
But it was convoluted enough
that any little moving part
could foil it, and one did.
Geiger's contract had a trade kicker,
a 15% raise in salary if he got dealt
that he'd have to waive
to make the four-team swap work under the salary cap.
Geiger refused.
He didn't want to go to Detroit.
So Allen Iverson didn't go to Detroit.
He stayed a Sixer,
and perhaps thanks to facing down a near-breakup,
the relationship between Iverson and Brown healed.
And here Iverson still is,
hoping to be the hero for the Sixers.
And you know what?
I think it's time to finally
fully address the question I asked before.
The Lakers are unstoppable.
They're cruising.
The Sixers made a huge midseason trade
and they've suffered innumerable injuries
over their grueling playoff run.
How the hell are they here,
on the verge of stealing Game 1?
The answer is The Answer.
Allen Iverson has done everything.
He is everything.
Iverson was this season's scoring champion,
averaging 31 points per game.
No other Sixer averaged more than 12.
Iverson also led the league
in minutes per game and steals per game,
which helped win him
the Most Valuable Player vote by a wide margin.
A pretty poetic outcome
after he stole a single solitary first-place vote
from Shaq's otherwise unanimous 2000 MVP Award.
By the way, quick aside to acknowledge
that I've mentioned a bunch of awards, haven't I?
MVP for Iverson, Sixth Man for McKie,
Defensive Player of the Year for Mutombo,
and guess what?
Brown won Coach of the Year, too.
All that for one team in the same season
has never happened before.
But yeah, the star around which all those people orbit
is definitely Iverson.
The Sixers would be nowhere without him.
It was clear in the regular season
and even clearer throughout this gauntlet of a playoff run.
While the Lakers laughed through a breezy 11 straight wins,
the Sixers fought uphill from the very beginning.
Philly dropped Game 1 of the first round
against the eight-seed Pacers
because of this last-second three-pointer by Reggie Miller.
So Iverson took over,
scoring 110 points over the next three games
to get the Sixers out of the series.
Next round, the Toronto Raptors,
featuring one of the only people on Earth
capable of matching Iverson's production on any given night.
And so he did.
Vince Carter scored 35 to Iverson's 36 to open the series
and the Raptors stole Game 1 in Philadelphia.
Iverson responded by hanging 54 on the Raptors
and his team needed all of it.
Snow was the only other Sixer
to even score in double figures,
but Philly secured a close Game 2 victory.
At home in Toronto for Game 3,
Carter came firing right back,
dropping 50 in a blowout Raptors win.
Iverson struggled a bit during Game 4,
but got a boost from Mutombo and McKie
and hit a big late three to help the Sixers tie the series.
And in Game 5, A.I. turned right back into the MVP
with 52 points on just 32 shots in a blowout win.
Toronto evened things back up in Game 6
and by Game 7, Iverson was running on fumes
and hurting badly after falling hard
on his already-injured left hip.
But Carter blew his chance to be a hero.
He made headlines
by attending his college graduation in North Carolina
the morning of Game 7,
then he went cold from the field throughout the game itself.
But with time winding down,
Carter had the ball with everything on the line,
got a pretty good look at the series-winning shot
and just missed it long at the buzzer.
The Sixers survived the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals
by the narrowest of margins.
- [Announcer] The Sixers hold on
and advance to conference finals!
- [Host] Next battle, Milwaukee Bucks
in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Iverson put up 34 in a Game 1 win,
but the hip and a bruised tailbone started to bother him.
He shot poorly and was outplayed
by Milwaukee's Ray Allen in a Game 2 loss.
The pain got bad enough
that Iverson sat for Game 3.
Philly competed valiantly
but fell behind in the series without their star.
Iverson didn't play great
upon returning for games four and five,
and on top of his preexisting conditions,
got a tooth knocked out.
Mutombo, though, stepped up big time
to help the Sixers swing the series back in their favor.
And then there's Game 6.
Game 6 didn't look like a big deal on paper.
The Bucks won by a pretty wide margin
to send the series to a decisive Game 7.
But it was big for other reasons.
Reason one is that Iverson woke up.
The Sixers got humiliated in the first half.
Ray Allen went on a 17-0 run by himself.
- [Announcer] Ray Allen spotting out for three.
Bang! (laughs)
- And Milwaukee led by as much as 33.
But for whatever reason,
Brown left some of his exhausted starters
on the floor late in the game
and they narrowly came back.
Iverson fully shook out of his funk
for a ridiculous 26-point fourth quarter,
and the Sixers lost Game 6 by just 10 points.
Another reason Game 6 mattered is that
the Bucks had been battling the refs all series long.
Glenn Robinson, who'd been ejected in Game 4,
complained about the foul differential.
Ray Allen complained that officials
had missed a goal tend by Mutombo
on his final attempt to win Game 5.
Allen even came right out and said
the league was hoping to put the Sixers in the finals.
He and Coach George Karl complained so much
that they'd eventually get fined.
And in Game 6, Milwaukee's conspiracy theory
got a little more fodder.
Starting power forward Scott Williams
put a kind of hard foul on Iverson,
and after the game,
it was surprisingly upgraded to a flagrant two,
which led to Williams' suspension for Game 7.
So Iverson's slump was busted,
the grumpy Bucks were depleted,
and as a result, Philly owned Game 7.
And that is how Allen Iverson
got the Sixers into this Game 1.
And now he has a chance to get them out of it.
That itself is kind of a miracle.
While the Lakers went on that big early run,
Iverson was cold.
He missed four of his first five shots
and coughed up a couple of unfortunate turnovers
against the defense of Kobe and Derek Fisher.
But at the end of that first quarter, he came alive,
sparked by some transition opportunities
and a couple J's from one of his pet spots
just inside the arc on the baseline.
From there, A.I. just took over.
Fisher couldn't hang
and all the L.A. big guys could do was foul him.
Iverson finished with 30 points in the first half,
five short of Michael Jordan's record for a finals half.
That gave him exactly 100 points
over the last seven quarters,
going back to the Bucks series.
Iverson was on one.
That said, after his 30-point first half,
Iverson has only 46 points here in overtime.
Relatively speaking, he has slowed down.
That's because Phil Jackson tried something different.
This guy.
The Lakers picked up Tyronn Lue on Draft Night '98
but they've barely used him since.
Lue played a total of just 61 regular season games
in his first three years
and had no role in the 2000 championship run.
Lue barely made this year's playoff roster,
earning the last spot
over the injured and disgruntled Isaiah Rider.
The most minutes he's played
in any of these Laker playoff games is 11,
and that was on a night L.A. beat the Spurs by 39 points.
Lue's main role heading into this series
was to impersonate Iverson
against L.A.'s first-unit defense in practice,
since he's little and quick like the Sixers' start.
But what if, instead of being Iverson,
Lue could beat Iverson?
Coach Jackson put his backup on the floor
in the middle of the third quarter
and Lue made him look brilliant.
The Lakers have stuck with him.
His quick feet allowed him
to put a ton of pressure on Iverson,
either nagging him into turnovers and tough shots
or just forcing the ball away from him
as part of super aggressive double teams.
Lue had the announcers gushing
over his outstanding defense just a few minutes ago.
- [Announcer] Iverson
will be dreaming about Tyronn Lue tonight.
- [Host] And I'm pretty sure
when the P.A. system asked who let the dogs out,
the crowd responded by Tyronn's last name.
♪ Who let the dogs out ♪
♪ Lue, Lue, Lue ♪
- [Host] The only reason Philly has this two-point lead
is because Lue fell down on offense a minute ago,
allowing Iverson to line up an open three at the other end.
And now, here we are, two-point game.
The man with the ball has been battered all playoffs long,
but he's been playing up to his MVP status in spite of it.
The man standing in his way
is getting the first real playoff minutes of his career
and he's made the most of them so far.
Around Iverson is the wreckage of three
controversial debilitating playoff series before this,
broken bones and bench warmers pressed into action.
Some of these guys weren't even around a couple months ago
and Iverson himself might not be around
if not for the choices of a middling roleplayer.
In any event,
these Lakers are a powerhouse defending champion
very, very unlikely to surrender the series.
But just for now, just for tonight,
Iverson has a chance to put Game 1 out of reach.
A bucket here would cement an iconic isolated moment
in what should otherwise be a series loss
for these massive underdogs.
Okay, let's watch.
Welcome to a moment in history.
- [Announcer] Iverson!
How about that?
It's over, Tyronn Lue!
(TV clicks off)