So . . . if you think back to when the Allen Iverson trade went down, that event attracted an awful lot of basketball commentary. Many people thought it turned the Nuggets into contenders. People mocked the Sixers for getting so little in exchange. Bill Simmons and other talked about how Iverson was one of the top fifty players of all time. And yet I feel like since the trade there’s been a curious silence around the fact that the post-deal Nuggets . . . aren’t a very good team. I mean, they’re okay but not clearly better than they were last year or before the deal.

And you can’t really say that The Answer doesn’t have any help any more. The thing of it is that you had two guys, ‘Melo and Iverson, who were high-volume shooters, big-time scorers, but relatively inefficient scorers. The bet is that putting them side-by-side changes that and one or both of them becomes much more efficient than they were as sole foci of the offense. What you got last night, though, was just two dudes combining to take 47 of the team’s 78 field goal attempts and only hitting 18 of them. Maybe next year when they have the chance to work together in the offseason, things will change. But it seems to me that, at a minimum, all the sportswriters who hailed this deal or slammed the Sixers have some kind of obligation to write about it again and say something.