Jerry Stackhouse on Allen Iverson

The Jerry Stackhouse-Allen Iverson narrative is a brief, unfortunate one. In 1995, the Sixers were going through their mid-90's awfulness and finished with the 3rd overall pick, with which they drafted Stack. The following April, Harold Katz sold the team to Comcast Spectacor and the Sixers, still awful, finished with the worst record and drafted Allen. After another wretched season and a half, they traded Jerry for Aaron McKie and Theo Ratliff.

Hindsight is hindsight, but you have to consider the ownership change when you look back. They had two consecutive top 3 picks and after only one full year together, they traded one of them. Can you imagine how irate we'd be if that happened today? We'll always have the 2001 Finals, but it's interesting to think about what could've been had ownership not changed hands and kept to a plan. Allen was Allen though.

The reason I bring this up is because CSN Philly talked with Stack about his time in the league (but not the condition of Dave Rueter's Stackhouse jersey, unfortunately) and Iverson, as sort of a companion piece to that amazing Grantland article from Jonathan Abrams.

One thing you may forget is that before Iverson, this was going to be Jerry's team.

He was given a tour of the arena now known as the Wells Fargo Center, which was still under construction. It would be "Stack’s House," everyone decided at that point.

Shame that they had to trade him for once realizing they were both shooting guards. Oh hi Larry Hughes, how did you get in here?

Also a big missed opportunity to reference the Corestates Center or the FU Center or the Wachovia Center. Funny that during any of those naming periods, the Sixers did not have a good center playing for them. Huh.

Stack's had a long career in the NBA, mostly because of his ability to adapt where Allen could not. And now he finds himself at age 38 playing a role on a Brooklyn Nets team with playoff run aspirations (too bad you couldn't beat THE SIXERS) because of his veteranosity, veteranness, and veterinarian talents.

Nets interim head coach P.J. Carlesimo said he plans to use Stackhouse down the stretch and in the playoffs, knowing that the veteran has "the ability to contribute to us -- perhaps even more so later on, because of his experience."

But favorite Stackisms have to be the fighting stories. Kirk Snyder, Jeff Hornacek, Christian Laettner... but the Iverson legend is the best.

Stackhouse and Iverson did get into a dust-up at a shootaround in 1997, about which Stackhouse was famously quoted as saying, "It was a fight between one guy who didn't know how to fight and another guy who didn't want to fight."

Dayum.

"I feel like I’m a guy that never started much, but I don’t have a problem bringing some closure to some things," he said. "It’s not the proudest moment to have that stuff out there, but at the same time, I’m always going to protect myself, protect my teammates. And I live by that code."

A Stack's gotta have a code.