Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Or better yet, stop the New York Post’s Marc Berman and that great basketball teacher, the New York Knicks’ Larry Brown.
“Look, I’ll take my credibility. I ain’t worried about my credibility. If you want to say because we don’t have freedom, that’s because we’re losing. That’s fine,” Brown said, reeling off the squad’s defensive problems – from fouls and turnovers (too many) to blocks (too few) and opponents’ FG percentage (too high).
“You want freedom?” Brown asked rhetorically. “How are you going to have freedom with those stats? That means [he] ain’t thinking about all the things that’s relevant.”
In his discourse Monday, Marbury wondered why Iverson never had the same constraints under Brown he has. Brown countered that Iverson played defense, played hurt, tried to win.
“You want to talk about the relationship with Allen Iverson and me,” Brown said. “Philly got stops, got blocks, got steals. One of the best defensive teams in the league every night.”
Brown said his feuds with Iverson centered solely on him not wanting to practice regularly.
“Never had things on the court,” Brown said. “On the court, he tried to win every game. He came to every game trying to win, played as hard as he possibly could. Hurt, broken down. The guy competed every single night and he had a team around him who accepted what he could do and they all knew every single night he was trying to win the game.”
As for Marbury, Brown took another dig, saying Jamal Crawford’s “becoming our best perimeter defender.”
Though I’m not convinced that anything Brown said above constitutes new ground in the distasteful pissing match between him and Stephon Marbury, I suppose we can figure this much : there are few slurs more damning than calling Jamal Crawford a superior defender.