Chocolate City Jordanaire wrote:The Yahoo reporter is calling blatche tired, sorry, and assuming that Andray's lying. Flip going public in the first place started this. Andray playing means Flip lost. He lost credibility. Thanks to Flip, Andray's lost credibility, too. This has been a lose lose. Nationally, bad press for the Wizards.
I think this is the bottom line, well illustrating why it's just a terrible idea to have these sorts of negative and sensationalist post game pressers loaded with banner sound bites for guys like Wojo and Wilbon to seize upon. Flip's 15 years of experience didn't tell him that this wasn't going to end well?
Yeah, there might be a 'proper way' for the players to respond, but it's always going to be a matter of damage control to minimize the negative fallout; no response is going to set things 'righter' than if Flip had just kept his mouth 'shutter' to start with.
90% of the national media is never going to believe that Blatche did anything other than outright verbally refuse to come back in the game. I've seen journalists say that Blatche initiated some kind of 'shouting match' with Flip
(it was actually a heated, but formal, post-game meeting with Ernie, but, whatever, much more exciting story this way). Once the Wiretap's buzzing, you can't put the shyte back in the bull.
While Blatche could have responded 'better', I'm quite sure that a continued pattern of this sort of things from Flip will undermine cohesion well past the breaking point, with players responsiveness inevitably and necessarily eroding. Let's not forget that this was the second media blowup in about a dozen games, with the first being a maverick diatribe about "piss dribbling down our
(his) leg" after a game that most people found encouraging (Boston). Does the team trust a guy who could thrash individuals publicly to the world after a tough loss on the road against a high seed playoff team? We'll give this guy three rookies next year? Really?
If he continues to average one media hatchet job per six games, we're looking at an untenable situation. Nobody's going to 'respond in a constructive manner to an authority figure' if this keeps up.
We'll just have to see how things play out from here, but it will be interesting to see if Saunders changes his policy seeing as that he was well within the blast radius of this one, if not at ground zero:
Saunders also disputed Wojnarowski's report that stated: "Pistons players tell the story of Rasheed Wallace calling Saunders the "worst [bleeping] coward I've ever seen" after a loss in the 2008 Eastern Conference playoffs. Everyone was there. Everyone heard it. And nothing. Saunders took it, and watched his credibility and command of that team die a little more."
"I've never been in a situation where something was said to me like that by Rasheed," he said, "but don't let the facts get in the way of a good story."
Lose, lose.....
or should that be 'loose, loose'?
