payitforward wrote:
This reminds me a little bit of Christian Wood's situation the first couple of years after he went undrafted.
Which was why I postulated that there might be an off the court issue. A locker room issue or the like. Christian Wood had a reputation of being something of a slacker and malcontent and bad attitude. That information traveled ahead of him until he changed his work ethic and attitude. He admits it.
And here it doesn't even have to be that he is a malcontent. Mathews strikes me as a competitive individual. Fiery and toughminded. I expect since he was being starved of touches and used less and less he can't have been happy. It's possible he said something, or asked to be traded. Ted has a policy of never holding on to a player who doesn't want to be here with his smirky maxim "Life is too short to drink bad wine". So at that point, based on organizational policy, the team simply lets go a player whose contract is expired. Maybe they tried to trade him with Troy etc but had no takers.
Scott Brooks has a reputation as a player's coach, but players like Troy Brown and Tomas Satoransky felt jerked around and confused by his conflicting messages, and not supported by the organization. What Brooks is is a star sniffer. If you are a role player then you simply don't matter and your voice gets lost. I'd bet Mathews would prefer to be anywhere that values what he does do well. Here Beal is going to get the lion's share of the touches, last year it was Russ and Beal. If Mathews was unhappy and let it be known, given his performance, I'd say it was reasonable. Still maybe he was perceived as sulking or checked out. Other teams don't pay as close attention to other team's role players. But if even the team that inked him and brought him up was letting him go, then other GMs may think: "we like his stats but hey, they probably know something we don't" and steer clear.
I agree it is stupid, and I personally was irked when I say that the job advert for scouts for the organization had Ted's bad wine maxim in the company policy. Competitive players are going to chomp at the bit and fight. We lose CWebb and Sheed etc when we don't appreciate that the best players are tough to handle at times, and not everybody is a boy scout. I don't know that Mathews expressed dissatisfaction at losing minutes, but I know that I as a fan did. I have to assume he was rightly pissed that during a contract year the team was playing Raul Neto as a small forward and shooting guard, instead of letting Mathews do the thing he does very well.
