Phil Sheridan | In defining act, King plays it unsafe

Give Billy King this: He's consistent. The only way the 76ers president could get more similar players on his roster would be to start cloning athletic, 6-foot-6 to 6-foot-8 small forwards. Andre Iguodala and Rodney Carney, meet Thaddeus Young. He may look a bit familiar, but that's OK.

And give King this: If this off-season is the one that ultimately defines him as an NBA executive, he is going to write that definition in his own hand.

Where the rest of the world would have taken Julian Wright of Kansas or Al Thornton of Florida State - and, indeed, those two went immediately after the Sixers' pick - King went with the 19-year-old Young with the 12th pick of the NBA draft last night. Thornton was the safest pick, a fifth-year senior who will be a fine pro. Wright was the easy-to-defend pick.

Young was a reach for a player who could be better than either, but could just as easily be forgotten by the time he's old enough to buy a beer.

The cynic might say using three first-round picks on your 2008-09 starting five is a ploy for postponing judgment - and hence prolonging job security. He's a pain in the neck, that cynic.

In two ways, last night's activities delivered the final verdict on the December trade of Allen Iverson to Denver.

The first way is obvious. We now know the full package King received for the mercurial all-star: veterans Andre Miller and Joe Smith, Colorado State junior forward Jason Smith, and Finnish guard Petteri Koponen, who immediately was shipped to Portland. Put that on one side of the scale and Iverson on the other.

But before you draw a conclusion, consider the second and less obvious aspect of the deal. When you see Seattle using Ray Allen to move all the way up to the No. 5 pick, and when names such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and Amare Stoudemire are in play, you have to wonder what Iverson would have brought now, had King waited to move the superstar.

There's no way to calculate what brand of hell the Sixers and their fans would have endured with an unhappy No. 3 playing out the season here. There's no telling what impact that would have had on the younger players, or on the team's final record. If anything, the Sixers likely would have been drafting higher than No. 12.

All you can really look at is the bottom line. In December, King got Miller and Joe Smith, plus the picks he turned into Jason Smith and Vanderbilt guard Derrick Byars.

In June, could he have done better? We'll never know. We do know Seattle scored Texas' Kevin Durant with a better lottery pick and Georgetown's Jeff Green, plus Delonte West and Wally Szczerbiak for a scoring guard who is just two months younger than Iverson.

That's the kind of wholesale change that invigorates an entire NBA market and shakes up an entire division.

What the Sixers did? Let's just say it didn't register on the Richter scale.

King made it clear for weeks that he would have liked to have traded up from that No. 12 spot. He wasn't as clear about whom he most coveted, for obvious reasons, but a few potential superstars went between the fifth and 10th picks. There was Chinese big man Yi Jianlian, who could wind up being a great player or a punch line someday. There were Florida stars Corey Brewer, who is going to be terrific in the NBA, and Joakim Noah, a legit 7-footer who would be everything the Sixers keep hoping Samuel Dalembert becomes.

The Boston Celtics' mystifying deal aside, there wasn't nearly the movement you might have expected from all the predraft reports. That should tell you something about the veracity of the predraft reports.

There were some surprises in the order of the first 11 picks, but when the Sixers' turn came, they were looking at pretty much the choices everyone predicted. They just didn't make the choice anyone expected. Online mock drafts aren't worth the paper they're not printed on, but I couldn't find anyone who had Young going higher than 14th.

"Before I worked out, people thought I would go in the 20s," Young said. "I worked out with a chip on my shoulder, and I thought I would be a top 15, 16 pick. I thought I would go after Al Thornton and Nick Young."

Thornton went at 14, Nick Young at 16. Most media types had Thaddeus Young closer to No. 20.

Everyone agreed that he's a great athlete, a bright young man and a solid citizen. Actually, that's a pretty fair description of King. But he doesn't need to be those things right now. He needs to be right.