I posted this a few months ago...but, to start with, Elvin Hayes was incredibly lucvy to play along Wes Unseld, who could have been different temperamentally and skill wise, to Elvin. Hayes was good for Unseld; I think Unseld was even better for Hayes. And Elvin had two issues that worked in conjunction to drive coaches and teammates crazy.
1)
Elvin Hayes was a black hole. He had a turnaround jumper and,as far he was concerned, that was the shot that his team needed to have put up....pretty much every time the team had the ball. Tex Winter coached Elvin Hayes in 1972...Hayes averaged 3.3 apg that year. It was the only season in his career he was over 2.5 assists per game...keep in mind that this was a guy who very often played over 40 minutes a game. He was under 2 assists a game lots of times. Even thought he got Hayes to pass a little bit, Winter hated Elvin. The feeling was mutual. To go with his unwillingness to pass, Hayes was not a high percentage shooter either...his career FG% is only .452. That made designing an effective offensive system around him next to impossible. Playing alongside him wasn't a whole lot better.
And it's not like he got more generous with the ball when he got older. In Hayes final season with Bullets, at age 35, he played nearly 3000 minutes...and had 98 assists for the season. Black Hole.
2)
If Elvin Hayes didn't agree with what you were doing, Elvin Hayes would tell you. He wasn't an in-your-face prick like Rick Barry; Hayes was just blunt. When Elvin didn't get his way, he would sulk. Since he didn't like coaches or players that told him to fit into offensive schemes that didn't let him shoot when he felt like it, Hayes alienated everyone from Alex Hannum to Tex Winter to Mitch Kupchak. The best thing that ever happened to Elvin Hayes was playing alongside a rugged, great passing C that didn't care about shooting. Still, for most of his teammates, he was the guy that didn't pass them the ball, and complained the most, and sulked when he felt he didn't get recognition for what he did well (which meant score and get help side blocks), and was the first one to point out the flaws in others while magically ignoring his own.
Hayes put it like this:
"I'm very honest about myself, and that's one reason I get in trouble. I speak what I feel. Other people are more diplomatic, but I don't feel, by doing that, that I'm a man."
Here is the effect on his teammates that Elvin Hayes had by being "a man."
"For some players and coaches, being around Elvin every day is like a Chinese water torture," John Lally, a trainer with the Washington Bullets when Hayes was with the team, told the Washington Post. "It's just a drop at a time, nothing big, but in the end, he's driven you crazy."