Philadelphia 76ers Offer Iverson: "Summer Interior"

We will continue to view the NBA season through the eyes of Edward Hopper. Feel free to add your thoughts on the 2010 Sixers in our comments section.

The threadbare sheets feel like cobwebs in her hands. As she lets them evaporate from her fingers, she counts the threads that remain on her skin, like stray hairs on an old man's scalp; they wiggle like legs plucked from a grandaddy spider in the breeze blowing in from the open window. Elton remembers how summer days in Durham when she used to trap grandaddy long legs in glass jars and pluck off their legs, using metal tweezers because she didn't want to dirty her hands.

Sitting on the hardwood floor, her own legs cramping and burning, Elton feels as if her own muscles are being squeezed by giant pair of tweezers. She is the twitching limb of a dismembered body, having lived out the American dream to its most bloated possibilities under the bright lights of southern California, all of her lies and deceit having brought her here to a seedy motel in Philadelphia, the birthplace of Declarations, of separations, and reinvention.

Elton would like to pull herself up from the floor, clean herself of experience, and put on a new dress, but her spot on the floor is as low as any valley, a stranger named Igoudala is in the shower, and the threads of that new dress are already as worn as the bed sheet.

Knock. Knock.

"Who's there?" she doesn't recognize her own voice, shattered like last night's shot glasses.

"Open the door, Elton. It's time to go home." The voice is more familiar than her own.

"Allen, is that you?" she asks the question as if she fears either of the two answers it might render.

"Is that the maid? Tell her to come back in an hour." Igoudala is out of the shower, a towel around his waste, droplets of water running down his shoulders clean as tomorrow's sun rays. Elton sits on the floor, frozen between Igoudala in the open doorway of the bathroom and Allen on the other side of the room's shut door. She goes back to rubbing the bed's cobwebs between her fingers and thumb, shaking her head slowly from side to side, like a weather vane in a stagnant breeze.

Bill Clinton Set to Liberate Blake Griffin from Clippers

Upon his return from Pyongyang, North Korea to secure the freedom of journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, former President Bill Clinton made it clear that he embarked on the mission as a humanitarian, not as a partisan favor to President Obama or to avenge the name-calling to which the North Koreans subjected his wife and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and it is in that same humanitarian spirit that the former President made the promise to liberate basketball player Blake Griffin from the LA Clippers.

Ling recalled the experience, "We feared at any moment that we could be sent away to a hard labor camp, and then suddenly we were going to a meeting....We were taken to a location, and when we walked through the doors, we saw... President Bill Clinton.... We were shocked, but we knew... the nightmare... was finally coming to an end." Ling added that she hopes Griffin can experience a similar rescue meeting before he winds up adapting to permanent servitude in the same manner that Chris Kaman has (pictured below).

Griffin already experienced an injury to his shoulder while enduring the Clippers summer work camp, and several people close to Griffin are concerned that the shoulder injury is just the start of the pain and torture the Clippers intend to inflict on the young power forward.

Former Clipper work camp prisoner Elton Brand told reporters, "Blake's got a heavy load to carry; he's a rookie. I was taken prisoner to L.A. with two years of NBA experience, and I still ruptured my Achilles [tendon] trying to lift those penny pinchers out of the mud; and that mud doesn't come off."

Brand's one season away from the Clipper's work camp was marred by injuries, and his Philadelphia teammates noted that a shadow hung over him and his locker.

Fellow Sixer Andre Igoudala described post-Clipper Brand as "a man you don't want to sneak up on cause he'll snap if there's a sudden noise or movement. He doesn't even sleep. His eyes are always open, even on the team plane. Some of our younger guys think we drafted him out of Iraq, Afghanistan, or some other scary as sh!t place."

Brand is not the only victim to have suffered physical and mental trauma at the hands of the Clipper regime. Other notable prisoners to have suffered irreparable damage include Bill Walton, Danny Manning, Ron Harper, and Shaun Livingston.

Livingston, in fact, makes Griffin's mother tremble the most about the experience that lays before her son, stating, "I know they wrecked his knee, but they've wrecked lots of knees. I'm just worried about his stomach. That Livingston boy was 6'7" and only weighed 100 pounds. His basketball card makes him look like one of those two cents a day kids. I don't want my Blake to go through that."

Well, hopefully, Mrs. Griffin will not have to endure any more stress over the imprisonment of her son because former President Bill Clinton is on his way to meet with Clipper leader Mike Dunleavy, Sr (pictured below), the team's coach and general manager.

Other items on Clinton's agenda include securing food rights for Clippers players, which would allow Baron Davis to shave his protest beard, and an end to Clipper vandalism of the Lakers locker room at the Staples Center, which many feel results from a hostility founded on jealousy. Clinton should be well-rehearsed at dealing with such emotions; after all, he did just finish dealing with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.