You Can't Stop the Prophet

As we all know Samuel Dalembert is a man who's myriad talents can scarcely be described by words. He is a shot-blocking machine, the Goya of goaltending and the Picasso of the personal foul. Not only that but he can tell how fresh a fish is by looking in it's eye! So is it any surprise to find out that Sammy D is a modern day Nostradamus, capable of foretelling the future through his dreams? From the sporadically informative Phil Jasner comes this astounding tale of prophecy:

"I told you about the dream I had before the season," the 76ers' center was saying during a weekend crammed with Allen Iverson-back-to-the-Sixers rumor and speculation. "I dreamed A.I. was coming back."

And then, late last week . . .

"I had the dream again," Dalembert said. "I woke up at 6:30 in the morning in my house, wondering if it could be true."

Could there be any doubt in any of our minds that the return of AI is anything less than guaranteed at this point? All the logical signs point in the direction of an Iversonian redux: the Sixers are a team stuck in perpetual neutral and going nowhere fast, they have the worst attendance in the league, and their point guard options are either A.I. Lite (Lou Williams) or 19 year old Jrue Holiday. They've got somewhere north of $200 million tied up in players who can't or won't take control of the game in crunch time, and the closest thing they have to veteran leadership is a 28-year-old Haitian center who would rather be a computer technician than an NBA player. Signing Iverson solves all those problems in one fell swoop!


(But EDG, you might ask: how does the signing of A.I. eliminate the $200 million that Iggy and Brand are stealing? Simple, I say. One hit of Iversonian weed will send both on a Harold and Kumar mission to the White Castle on North Broad, where they will be robbed of their wallets by a disguised Marreese Speights and Dionte Christmas. Enlisting Sammy D's computer expertise, they will steal Brandguodala's identity, and use the new ID to purchase bootleg DVD's of Rescue Dawn from Chelten Ave, thus violating a contractual clause forbidding the purchase of pirated material and rendering both contracts null and void.)

On the other hand, would the return of A.I. actually be beneficial to the Sixers? After all, do we really need a veteran presence if that veteran is shooting 35 times a game and teaching young and impressionable players how to smoke weed, skip practice, and hang out in TGI Fridays until 5am?

I say yes. And I say that if it's been prophesied by Samuel Dalembert, it's only a matter of time until it becomes reality. Better have the riot gear ready.