AI's Days in Detroit Are About More Than Money

Is it too soon to ask what becomes of Allen Iverson, or at least how much money he sees next season? The Nuggets have improved by leaps and bounds with old, boring Chauncey Billups at the helm, Iverson seems unable to get on track in Detroit, and at the end of the season, someone is going to ink the best little man in the history of the game.

Sad as it might seem, though, I think these next few months could find AI relegated to sideshow status, playing for big money on a crap team just to put butts on the seat (if not make the team relevant). Either that or take a massive pay cut to chase a ring as an outright role player, a description which really doesn't jive with anything we know about the man or his game. This whole AI-to-Detroit thing has alternately been posed as "an experiment" and "this team getting a superstar to put them over the top." I have no idea how we failed to see how far apart these two are.

Maybe the Pistons would've slipped (or continued to slip, even) without this deal. And while Billups is playing well, it's not like he's broken the sound barrier and transformed into Devin Harris overnight, or whatever. But what Iverson has to realize is that, as this season continues, he's not just reducing the amount of money some team's willing to offer him this summer. He's determining how he's going to ride into the sunset. There's perhaps no player more prideful in this league than AI. To see him reduced to a ring-chaser seems unlikely, but so does being reduced to a starring attraction on the Grizzlies.

The only option is, as they say, for AI to find a way to "make it work" in Detroit and beyond. He can handle the pay cut. It's about how this final phase of his career is perceived that's probably keeping him up at night.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.