This mess gets messier
Updated: Allen Iverson will not return to the 76ers this season. The Sixers officially confirmed this morning. Here's what General Manager Ed Stefanski said in this morning's press release: "After discussing the situation with Allen, we have come to the conclusion that he will not return to the Sixers for the remainder of the season, as he no longer wishes to be a distraction to the organization and teammates that he loves very deeply," Stefanski said. "It has been very difficult for Allen and the team to maintain any consistency as he tries to balance his career with his personal life."
As if the 76ers on-court performance wasn't enough tonight, tonight became even more disturbing after the game.
Only a few minutes after tonight's 126-105 loss to the Orlando Magic, Sixers coach Eddie Jordan had some pretty harsh words about the character of his team. Here's Jordan's words from tonight's post-game press conference:
"We just didn't respond in a passionate way. We lost the passion to compete. We saw some pooor body language and there was a couple of timeouts where we addressed it. And I wasn't going to have it. I addressed it a couple of times; I addressed it just then, just now. It's leadership or lack thereof. It's contagious where misery, just one guy's miserable and it's just contagious throughout the team and we just can't have. Someone has to stand up and try to rally the troops, your teammates. The coaches are certainly trying to do it every timeout, every time we get a chance to. But it doesn't come from the coaches ... We try to address it; we try to get them with some more spirit and some more positive energy. And it's just hard when you don't have that sort of internal leadership."
How often has he encountered the problem?
"Maybe once or twice, but certainly tonight was, I didn't want to see the same sort of body language, the same sort of lack of energy. We were right there with it. I don't know if it was worse than last year or about the same, but it was certainly addressed."
More from Jordan: "They just dominated the game. We were dominated. We were dominated. And whether you're dominated or not, you have to learn how to compete, you have to learn how to rally, you have to learn how to hold your chin up, as individuals, as professionals, you have to learn how to do it. If you've gone through it before, and you went through it again, now is the time you should have learned some lessons and try to get it up. But, obviously, our team hasn't learned it."
"You start to play the blame game and it really leads to a dead end, it doesn't go anywhere. I'm just going to go out there and keep doing what I've been doing my whole career, which is play basketball the right way."