SAN ANTONIO VS. LOS ANGELES PHILADELPHIA VS. MILWAUKEE

Wednesday, May 30 Iverson might be MVP, but will Sixers win? By Mitch Lawrence Special to ESPN.com The Sixers might not win the Lawrence O'Brien Trophy. Check that, they aren't winning the NBA title, which begins Saturday in the Alamodome. But they're walking away with all the big individual awards. Iverson is playing like an MVP in the playoffs, but can he get to the Finals? Tuesday, they added Allen Iverson's MVP to their trophy case, which had already been stocked with Dikembe Mutombo's Defensive Player of the Year Award and Aaron McKie's Sixth Man Award. That's quite an impressive collection of hardware. Now if they can just make it out of the second round... Heading into Wednesday's Game 5 in Philly, the Sixers are still a long way from advancing to their first Eastern Conference Finals since 1985. "Nobody ever told me that winning a championship was going to be easy," Iverson said. "We found that out the hard way, that it's not easy. It's not easy to win a playoff game." Unless you're the Lakers or Spurs. But if you happen to play East of the Mississippi River, it's hard to win anywhere. Even on your home floor. For the Sixers, that means Wednesday night in the First Union Center against a Raptors team that could have easily gone up 3-1 in the conference semis. The Raptors scored only one point in the final 2:45 of Game 4, covering their final five possessions. That horrendous stretch run allowed the Sixers to tie the series despite scoring a playoff-low 14 points in the final period. As shaky as the Sixers were, Toronto turned the ball over three times in the last 1:55, with Vince Carter going for the trifecta -- a turnover, missed foul shot and errant three-pointer in the final 1:30. "We just couldn't close it out," Carter said. "But this is a good series. We knew we weren't going to get swept." As did the entire Western Hemisphere. They're only playing the Sixers. Regardless of how many trophies they've been taking home, they're still not a team that sends fear down the Raptors' spines. Or anyone else's. "We know if we play hard, we can beat this team," said the Raptors' Jerome Williams. "And if we don't play at our top level, they'll beat us. We're pretty evenly matched." Which tells you something about the quality of the East. The Sixers finished with nine more wins than the fifth-seeded Raptors, but that has nothing do with what's going on now. Davis Lynch For the rest of the series, the Sixers will have to hold off Carter without one of their key defensive players. Already with a shallow bench, they'll miss George Lynch , who broke his foot in Game 4 and is out for the season. "We've had adversity all season long," said Iverson, recalling Theo Ratliff's wrist injury before the All-Star break. "We'll just have to do deal with this latest adversity, too." They don't have a monopoly on misfortune, either. The Raptors don't know if they'll have Antonio Davis, who suffered a shoulder injury in Game 4. Davis has been averaging 16 ppg and a team high 11.8 rebounds in the series. Obviously, he's more critical to the Raptors' success than Lynch is to the Sixers. If the Raptors don't have Davis at full strength, that's a mortal wound to their playoff hopes. Either way, other people will have to continue to step up. In Game 4, Iverson finally got some scoring help from McKie. Inserted in the lineup for the ineffective Eric Snow, he scored 18 points -- the most by a Philly starter other than Iverson in the series. That's how weak Iverson's supporting cast had been, leading to his harsh criticism in a team meeting the day before Game 4. "We didn't take it personally," McKie said. They shouldn't have, because Iverson was correct in challenging the other players to step up. McKie answered the challenge with his best offensive game since Game 3 of the Indiana series, when he scored 22 points off the bench in 36 minutes. “ We've had adversity all season long. We'll just have to do deal with this latest adversity, too. ” — Iverson on the Lynch injury "Aaron's play was the difference," said Toronto's Alvin Williams. "It took more pressure off Allen to score. When Aaron is playing well, it's harder to double-team Allen. That was the type of performance they needed from another player to win. One game, Allen Iverson will play really well and the Sixers will win. The next game, it will be Vince's turn. But in a series, it's about the other guys who step up." Both teams need those players to advance. New Knicks Regime With Dave Checketts' firing as Madison Square Garden CEO, James Dolan will take over running the Knicks. Who? Dolan, chairman of MSG, is second in command to his father, Charles, the head of Cablevision, which owns the Garden sports empire, along with Radio City Music Hall. In James' bio in the Knicks' media guide, he's described as an "ardent fan" of the Knicks, Rangers and WNBA Liberty. And he does sit in front-row seats at the Garden during Knicks games, although in relative obscurity, compared to such fixtures as Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Sean Combs, and the occasional celeb, like Paul McCartney and Keith Richards. Already, people within the Knicks are thinking that the younger Dolan got rid of Checketts so he can become the New York version of Mark Cuban. Heaven help us. We'll see about that, but Dolan isn't going to be able to do much that quickly with the Knicks, who, in Checketts' 10-year regime, overspent on contracts to the point where they're capped out "in our lifetime," as GM Scott Layden told an associate last summer. The Knicks are on the books for next season at close to $80 million after having the second-largest payroll to the Blazers this past season. Dolan's No. 1 problem is finding a franchise talent who can help the Knicks win a title for the first time since 1973. They haven't had such a player since Patrick Ewing, circa 1997. The Knicks' failure to get out of the first round, the Rangers' inability to get into the playoffs the past four seasons -- along with the New Jersey Devils' continued success, only five miles due West of the Garden -- all played a factor in Checketts' downfall. One of his last major projects involved designing the new Garden, which he had hoped to open in the 2005-06 season. Now, James Dolan takes over that project. Even with all the headaches associated with building a new Garden, it's got be easier than rebuilding these Knicks. Mitch Lawrence, who covers the NBA for the New York Daily News, writes a regular NBA column for ESPN.com. 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