alienpick wrote:puja21 wrote:Sweet Meat Lew wrote:You almost died last year from a heart defect and then declare after avg 4 pts your freshman year and you are being selective over the visits you'll take? I don't get it at all. What fringe late second/2 way guys are turning down opportunities to show interested teams what they can do? This is weird.
Weird as in unusual, yes.
Different because his power doesn't come from analogous on-court results to what his peers have shown (at least not recently)
But he's still just leveraging whatever power is available to him, and that's not new in sports.
Many times the players' results are bad:
-Maurice Clarett and Mike Williams (USC) in the draft age challenge
-Le'Veon Bell with his holdout.
Other times it works:
-Lebron axing tons of coaches
-Kobe forcing his way out of Charlotte to LA
-Eli Manning, John Elway, Jim Kelly all refused to play for their top-suitor draft teams
-Jordan and Barkley both opting out of the NBA Players' Association to negotiate their own marketing deals
Kobe didn't force his way out of Charlotte, the Hornets took him so they could trade for Vivac.
You're arguing semantics.
He didn't make a public statement, but this was orchestrated.
The Hornets only knew of that opportunity because Arn Tellem put everyone on notice.
Ever the storyteller / image crafter (same as Jordan and Lebron etc...) Bryant later made up a fairytale that Dave Cowens told him "we don't want you" -- Cowens disputes this to this day, saying he never even saw KB play and had no opinion.
And Tellem waas on record with SI long before Kobe's infamous "Hornets had no use for me" tweet, saying he didn't let Bryant workout for anyone because they were orchestrating the move to LA.
The point is that *could've* backfired -- someone could've just taken him like the Kings did Boogie Cousins and refused to move him. You don't know for sure how a power play like that is going to work until the benefit of hindsight.