A lot of what shaped Andre Iguodala’s NBA upbringing is regarding what Allen Iverson taught him.
Hailing from the University of Arizona via Springfield, Illinois, Iguodala knew little about the sports media scene in Philadelphia. While he’s recently entered the space himself, he recounted on the 7PM in Brooklyn with Carmelo Anthony & Kid Mero podcast that the biggest lesson he retained from Iverson was, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
“When we pulled up to the hotels and there’d be people in the lobbies, people outside the hotel, you don’t know it’s different than anything else,” he explained. “But I’m knowing it’s ’cause of him. And I think for all of us, he did a really good job forewarning us of what was to come — the downfall. He’s like, ‘Listen, man, at some point, they gonna turn on y’all. Be careful who y’all are cool with.'”
Iguodala didn’t know what to think. He was a newspaper reader through and through—he’d read the paper every day growing up. And being new to the City of Brotherly Love, he was unfamiliar with the media landscape and how “they’re not as happy as a population, to put it nicely.”
“He would say, ‘Man, don’t read the paper.’ I would read all the paper. I didn’t just read the sports,” said Iguodala. “He was like, ‘Man, stop reading it.’ And boy, was he right. He was like, ‘These people gonna turn on. you.’ And we would have certain games where he would get a few FGAs up, or we’d be losing, and he’d start attacking the basket. And the ball might stop moving, things of that nature, but before you know it, it’s like, ‘Man, if we lose, they gonna blame me.'”
In Iguodala’s eyes, the team’s departure from a winning mentality after Larry Brown’s exit resulted in more criticism directed at Iverson. He suggests this negativity, likely stemming from a shift in priorities, played a role in Iverson’s sour relationship with the media.
“When he got to Denver, it was more so of a relief for him,” explained Anthony. “The fact that he didn’t have to deal with the pressures of the media every single day. He got a chance to turn over a new leaf coming to Denver, and also, he had me there with him to kind of take a lot that off of him, where he could just play ball.”
[7PM in Brooklyn with Carmelo Anthony & Kid Mero]
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.