SmartWentCrazy wrote:truth18 wrote:All this leadership and toxic chemistry talk about Kyrie is bull.
He sucked on court. He was selfish ON COURT. He let the uncalled hand-checking get to him mentally when he should have just dealt with it. Those are the issues: basketball, not media ****.
And a lot of other dudes sucked last night too. We just **** suck. So sick of people obsessed with the NBA media/players off court. The same type of people who believe Durant and Westbrook were ever friends of any sort are the people who care about this stuff.
I guarantee you Brown and Tatum dislike Gordon more than Kyrie for taking away their minutes for example, but even that isn't enough to cause real chemistry issues imo.
If you are going to hate on Kyrie do it for the right reasons. And I just want to say one more time: everyone here knew he had a F.R.I.E.N.D.S tattoo and thought the earth was flat when he signed here. This isn't Mark Price or some ****, you only have yourself to blame if you didn't understand that he's a different dude. It's all about his massive talent and upside, not the bull **** he says to reporters.
I’m pretty sure I know your source and I believe you 100%. I also want to echo the bolded— Jackie Mac said that after she wrote her piece on Jaylen struggling to begin the year, his people were furious she didnt write about Hayward and his struggles. Other plugged in guys, such as Simmons, stated that Stevens treated Hayward like a little league parent always batting his kid clean up.
If I had to guess, dudes really disliked Hayward [not personally— hes not a bad person] and tuned out Stevens accordingly.
Yeah, yeah, that Hayward-Stevens thing has really been the source of this bad chemistry from the start of the season. The team was already in place, they went to conference finals, their best player was coming back... but there was also another guy coming back, who played at same position as some of the key players on the team, and he got guaranteed minutes, even though he was a shell of himself.
He got those minutes at the expense of the players who have supposedly earned their status, and contributed to team's sucess previous season. No wonder that the chemistry wasn't right. Even when Hayward was moved to the bench, it was just an alibi for Stevens, and not a real change. He was still getting his minutes, playing more than Jaylen Brown throughout the whole season bsically, and he was still struggling to the point were it looked painful to watch.
Stevens messed up, it's a simple as that. All Kyrie drama has been unnecessary, and he should have done better in those moments of adversity. But that drama wasn't the cause of bad chemistry, it was his reaction to bad chemsitry that existed from the very start. Hierarchy on the team matters, structure matters, and Stevens messed it up.
(but he always takes one with the person I bring along). Dude is actually a homie. Learned a lot about the Eagles' young dudes.
