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And now for something completely different — a high-profile, decorated basketball star who is not demanding a trade, tampering with another team’s alpha baller, hissy-fitting over his playing time or airing grievances on social media.
Welcome back, Andrew Bogut.
Surely you’ve heard the news. Bogut is rejoining the Warriors for the rest of the regular season and the playoffs. It’s an unexpected reunion for the agreeable Aussie, who played four seasons with the Dubs, contributing to the team’s championship effort in 2014-15.
He spent this season in the Australian league, where he was Most Valuable and Defensive Player of the Year. The chance to rejoin the Warriors is the cherry on top.
“It’s funny how life works and funny how the world works,” Bogut said at a news conference in Australia on Wednesday. (If you like your news conferences unfiltered, you can drop in on the entire 11:30 Q&A session here.) “It’s an absolute honor. Obviously Steve Kerr is a sensational, not only coach, but a person, the way he manages the day-to-day and the way he manages personalities.”
Kerr contacted Bogut to talk about his role “and saying hey, just letting you know,” Bogut related. “I said, ‘Stop right there. I’m under no illusions.’ I’ll get some minutes, but there will be games I don’t play. That’s not an issue for me.”
Nice to know, because the NBA is in the grip of an ill-will epidemic. Don’t take our word for it. Take the commissioner’s.
“When I meet with (NBA players), what surprises me is that they’re truly unhappy,” Adam Silver said at a conference last week, as reported by Boston.com. “A lot of these young men are generally unhappy. There’s enormous jealousy amongst our players. If you’re around a team in this day and age, there are always headphones on. (Players) are isolated, and they have their heads down.”
If there is someone who could be excused for harboring a grudge, it would be Bogut. After his fourth season with the Warriors, which ended with a crushing Game 7 loss in the NBA Finals, he was sacrificed as part of the team’s recruitment of Kevin Durant. At which time he went tumbling down the cellar stairs.
The Warriors traded Bogut to Dallas. After 26 games, the Mavericks dealt him to Philadelphia. Four days later, the 76ers cut him. The Cavaliers signed him; within 60 seconds of his first game for the Cavs, Bogut broke his leg. “Yesterday was the anniversary of breaking my leg in Cleveland,” he noted during the news conference. “My agent was nice enough to mention that to me.”
The Cavaliers waived Bogut basically before his plaster cast had dried.
The Lakers took a flier, signing Bogut for the 2017-18 season. He played in 23 games before he was waived. The whole sequence of events had to have been a come-down for a guy who was the first pick in the 2005 draft.
You wouldn’t know it by listening to him.
The subject came up in the news conference, with a reporter asking why Bogut would want to go back after how it ended for him at Golden State.
“I understand it’s a business,” he said. “They had a chance to sign Kevin Durant, and I’m the odd man out because I was making $12 million the next season there. (They had) to free up some cap space. I would do that to myself if I was the GM. These things happen.
“It got ramped up a little bit in the media that I was bitter and hated everyone there. That wasn’t the case. I kept in touch with a lot of guys there. To have a chance to go back, it’s a cool story.”