<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">PHILADELPHIA - Before and after Sixers games, it's common to find Willie Green sitting in front of his locker, paging through a copy of the Bible, searching for a line of Scripture to sustain him. But at the moment this season when maybe he most needed some form of spiritual support, there was no Bible to be found near his locker late Sunday afternoon - just a mass of media members waiting to ask him about the missed free throw that could have saved the Sixers. He had made one free throw, of course, the second of two with 3.1 seconds left in regulation, the one that sent Game 4 of this first-round playoff series into overtime. From there, though, the Detroit Pistons pulled away for a 97-92 win and a 3-games-to-1 lead in the series, and so Green was left to chew on the hardest two words in the world: what and if. He had left that first foul shot short, the ball barely scraping the front of the rim. He gathered himself and swished the second to tie the game at 83, but it was the one that could have tied the series that stayed with him, and everyone at the Wachovia Center. "That's what basketball players do - get up there and knock down free throws," he said. "And I didn't hit them." In a way, it was stunning that he was on the court at all in those final seconds of regulation, that with the Sixers trailing by one point he was out there to back-rim a 3-pointer, chase down his own rebound, and coax a cheap foul from Chauncey Billups. For most of this, Green's second season in the NBA, Sixers coach Jim O'Brien insisted he couldn't play the 6-4 Green and the 6-foot Allen Iverson in the same backcourt. Too many defensive mismatches, O'Brien claimed. Green sat out 20 games on that argument alone, yet the Sixers won Game 3 and nearly won Game 4 with Green and Iverson playing major minutes together. Even now, Green doesn't know what he did to persuade O'Brien to play him, if he did anything at all. No one should be branding O'Brien a master strategist for going to Green and making this series competitive again. This was merely a desperate move from a coach too stubborn to change his mind long ago, when playing Green and Iverson together might have helped even more. "I've just been praying about the situation, hoping I get a crack at it," Green said. "I appreciated I was able to get out there and play."</div> Source
