The most complicated situation involves Iverson. I can't tell you how many times over the past few years I've been asked: "Hey, what do you think of this Iverson?" The questioner's own opinion about Iverson is so transparent that he might as well phrase it as: "What do you think about that black criminal with cornrows who plays for the Sixers and shoots too much?" Public opinion in the ongoing Iverson vs. Larry Brown soap opera lies clearly with the coach, who has become increasingly bold in his anti-Iverson utterances, in the process drawing the support of Pat Croce, the Sixers' preternaturally chirpy president. The result is that Iverson has been shopped as if he were a bracelet -- adorned with diamonds, but damaged -- on QVC.

For the record, Iverson is not the player I would choose to build a team around. He takes too many unwise shots (which is different from shooting too much), and, though a quicksilver ballhawk, is too small to be much of a defensive force. He's also the Sly Stone of NBA players -- immensely entertaining but frequently late to his gigs. Nevertheless, to put all of the blame for the Sixers' chemistry problems on Iverson's tattooed shoulders (I'm not sure he has tats on his shoulders but if he doesn't he surely will one day) is absurd. If you want to blame Iverson alone, are you also ready to blame the concussion-prone Lindros and the locker-room soliloquist Schilling for all the ills of the Flyers and Phils? Iverson is a great player with a complex about being disrespected. Lindros is a great player with a tendency to pout and an apparent inability to inspire his teammates. Schilling, now a Diamondback, is a great player who shoots off his mouth too much and seems to think that his participation in a pennant race was celestially ordained.

Then, too, it's easy to forget that athletes aren't the only human beings with inflated egos. (Granted, they're at the top of the list.) The major reason for unrest in the Flyers' camp over the years is the antipathy that general manager Bobby Clarke feels toward Lindros's father-agent and, by extension, toward Lindros. Do you think that Clarke, a former player with a distinctly pugnacious style, doesn't have an ego? Do you think that Larry Brown, who has been called a genius more often than Einstein has (of course, Brown has been in more places) does not? The man is making the kind of green -- $6 million of it -- that enabled him to turn his back on Carolina blue, and everyone in the Sixers organization is at his beck and call.

I'm not saying that Brown and the Sixers are wrong and Iverson is right. What I am saying is that nothing is black and white in these conflicts, except for skin color -- which I have to believe has something to do with the anti-Iverson sentiment.