Rozier On Get Up! & First Take Today

[SparzWizard]

Terry Rozier just now on @FirstTake about the sacrifices he made this season:

"The ball in was either Kyrie or Gordon Hayward's hands most of the time. So, I feel like Terry Rozier is just in the corner or on the bench."

https://twitter.com/darren_hartwell/status/1128315689679429632

He's talking about himself in the third person. This is absurd. He is absurd.

The fact that he's in the corner or on the bench says a lot about his basketball IQ lol.

Terry, you flat out suck and you are garbage. Rather have Phil Pressey over you at this point.

[SparzWizard]

This is also Ainge's fault for not flipping him over the summer when his value was still high from a fluke run the season prior.

Hope it's biting him in the back right now.

[konkmv]

All this talking from rozier  shows something.. too many egos... too many guys who think are alpha dogs... players who want the ball more than accepted... rozier morris must go... a good passer and a good rebounder should make as much better nextt year

[GreenFaith1819]

This is Kyrie Irving's team - in BOSTON - if he WANTS it.

As for Rozier? I wish him well wherever he lands. He needs his OWN opportunity.

He's proven himself  to ME. Dude played himself to respectability during that playoff run last year.

I'll always appreciate his effort, talent and heart.

That 2017-18 Boston Celtics team - especially in the PLAYOFFS - will go down in "MY" memory as one of our best post-seasons. And Rozier was our starting PG for it.

[Androslav]

This makes it so much easier for me to move from Terry.

He's so full of himself.

Those are the optics, but he has a big contract on the line and he said what he needs to;
I want more, I can do more, I sacrificed, I showed what I can do when given a the chance.
If I were his agent I'd say he did good in that regard.

Will any GMs actually buy any of that though?

There are more teams with a lot of cap space then there are marquee free agents.
This is Rozier's hunting ground. Opportunistic approach.
He will feed after big predators satisfy their needs.
Some teams will luck out. They will still have cap space and some will have a need of a young guard.
So, it is better to sound confident, ambitious and ready for the starting job then any other alternative.
I don't hold a particularly high opinion of Terry as a player, he is a good NBA player, but nothing more up to this point.
Just to set that straight.

I don't know if he will land his preferred deal, but the strategy is valid.

[Roy H.]

No accountability. He thinks he can coast on a couple of months of good play from last year.

I think it was more he wanted the opportunity to expand on a couple months of good postseason play from last year, to prove that he can be that player as a starting point guard and show runner on a team.  And he is troubled by never getting that opportunity.

As a point guard myself, I can say its difficult to play alongside other point guards.  You try your best, but it can be frustrating when neither of you feel like you can really maximize your own utility in order to help your team win.  Usually it works out best for one to defer to the other and the deferring one tries to do his best playing in a role that doesn't utilize his strengths.  And it sounds like Terry was the one being asked to defer and change his game.

I don't want to excuse Terry necessarily for his poor play and certainly can't say that his play this season ever earned him any more time.  But I can totally get what he's feeling inside.  It was a ****ty situation.

And I've got a ton of respect for players that can adapt and change their games to fit alongside similar players.  CP3 has particularly impressed me in that regard.  But I definitely can understand how its hard to do that.

But, the inability to adapt or defer to better players is a flaw. The guy can’t accept a role.  And he shows zero accountability, and blames others.

It may be hard, but I don’t want guys who perform only when things are easy.

[mmmmm]

The Celtics failure was a team wide failure with blame to go around to everyone. Kyrie, in no way, shape or form was this team's only reason for underperforming.

While this statement is true in an absolute technical sense, I'm not sure I accept it qualitatively.   It is the sort of statement that whitewashes the tremendous disparity in responsibility that different characters had in this drama.

A guy like Yabu or Wanamaker simply can't be compared to folks like Kyrie, Al, Stevens, etc., when it comes to the impact that they had on this season.

Kyrie shot the most shots, controlled the ball the most, was second most in minutes, made the most public comments -- whatever measure you want to use, he was overall one of if not THE most influential player on the team.   If the season had gone well, he would deserve the majority of the praise.   And because the season didn't, he has to take the majority of the blame.  That's just the way it is.

I agree, though, that he has some company.    Certainly Ainge and Brad have to be at least as influential on the season as any of the players.

I think Brad really handled this season poorly in many ways.  But at least he has publicly owned that he doesn't think he did a good job.  He called himself out as having made mistakes and needing to learn and improve from it.  So people seem to be willing to back off from flailing him.

If Kyrie had the means of speaking in public in a way as to own his responsibility without hedging, waxing mysterious or throwing others under the bus, I suspect that would go a long ways to improve fan impression of him.   But I haven't seen much sign of that from him yet.

To bring it back to the thread: I don't really see the point of getting too bent about Rozier.  He was the third string small guard who was far too often asked to play as a small wing - a role he has sucked at for two years straight now.   While he sounds like a tool to be complaining publicly, I don't really blame him for being frustrated.  His career is at stake and he's been shoved into a wrong-shaped role.   

In the end, he's most likely going to get picked up by another team so to me that's even less reason to get all worked up about him.

I'm far more concerned about the problems being surfaced by what he has said.   That comment about them practicing one way and then abandoning that when they'd get on the game floor was very disturbing.    Was Stevens that out of control of this team?

So If Kyrie is tops to blame for this season, does he get all the credit for last seasons incredible run with him on the court?

I mean he led the team to the highest win percentage the team has seen since the 2010 season.

Sure.  He certainly deserves massive credit for helping us get to our 39-21 record in the 60 games that he played that year.

[ozgod]

All this talking from rozier  shows something.. too many egos... too many guys who think are alpha dogs... players who want the ball more than accepted... rozier morris must go... a good passer and a good rebounder should make as much better nextt year

Yep...this team was rotting from the inside.

[mmmmm]

Here's some of the video from the First Take article. In this one he basically says that he wasn't able to play the way he could play because of Kyrie and Gordon. Apparently he had to share the ball with Kyrie for half his minutes and with Gordon for the other half and that the ball was never in his hands and that he felt Gordon's usage was really high and they ran a lot of plays for him. Obviously Kyrie had a usage of 28% but Gordon had a usage of 18% and in fact he was the one who often was standing in the corner.

Well, you do need to look at the last number in the relevant lineups.

In lineups with both Gordon and Terry but without Kyrie, Gordon's USG did go up slightly, to just under 21%.   But Terry's also went up to about the same.  Not sure this would be an area of complaint.

Perhaps more to Rozier's issue is that in these lineups Hayward had higher AST% numbers?  I.E., it is probably not the share of shots taken (USG) that he's referring to, but rather ball-handling.   Hayward had somewhat higher AST rates in these lineups than Terry, though nothing extreme.   Both saw much higher USG and AST rates without Kyrie on the floor.

[nickagneta]

The more I remember Rozier playing like he did and acting like he is, the more I appreciate Jaylen Brown. Brown struggled with his role, but he adapted and drowned out all the negativity and drama and turned into the best player version of himself in the process. After Brown healed up after being injured and relegated to the bench, he turned things around. He, Al and Morris were the team's best players in the playoffs.

And Brown isn't throwing people under the bus. He didn't complain about what happened. And he showed, he is a professional. Even his public push back of Kyrie's public criticism of the youth, in hindsight, shows better leadership than anything Kyrie did publicly.

[mmmmm]

The funny thing about all of this is that even if you took Kyrie and Hayward off the team, Rozier is clearly still not a starter with Smart, Brown, and Tatum all clearly ahead of him.

Let’s not forget the fact that Rozier only started for us down the stretch and in the playoffs last year due to both Kyrie AND Smart being out with injury, as Smart was starting when Kyrie went down. And once Smart came back midway through the first round it didn’t make sense to put a rusty guy right back in the starting lineup, which is why Rozier stayed as starter.

That's not actually correct.   Brad consistently chose Rozier as the starter over Smart that year even when Smart was healthy.  That was true even earlier in the season before Smart got injured.

[ozgod]

The Celtics failure was a team wide failure with blame to go around to everyone. Kyrie, in no way, shape or form was this team's only reason for underperforming.

While this statement is true in an absolute technical sense, I'm not sure I accept it qualitatively.   It is the sort of statement that whitewashes the tremendous disparity in responsibility that different characters had in this drama.

A guy like Yabu or Wanamaker simply can't be compared to folks like Kyrie, Al, Stevens, etc., when it comes to the impact that they had on this season.

Kyrie shot the most shots, controlled the ball the most, was second most in minutes, made the most public comments -- whatever measure you want to use, he was overall one of if not THE most influential player on the team.   If the season had gone well, he would deserve the majority of the praise.   And because the season didn't, he has to take the majority of the blame.  That's just the way it is.

I agree, though, that he has some company.    Certainly Ainge and Brad have to be at least as influential on the season as any of the players.

I think Brad really handled this season poorly in many ways.  But at least he has publicly owned that he doesn't think he did a good job.  He called himself out as having made mistakes and needing to learn and improve from it.  So people seem to be willing to back off from flailing him.

If Kyrie had the means of speaking in public in a way as to own his responsibility without hedging, waxing mysterious or throwing others under the bus, I suspect that would go a long ways to improve fan impression of him.   But I haven't seen much sign of that from him yet.

To bring it back to the thread: I don't really see the point of getting too bent about Rozier.  He was the third string small guard who was far too often asked to play as a small wing - a role he has sucked at for two years straight now.   While he sounds like a tool to be complaining publicly, I don't really blame him for being frustrated.  His career is at stake and he's been shoved into a wrong-shaped role.   

In the end, he's most likely going to get picked up by another team so to me that's even less reason to get all worked up about him.

I'm far more concerned about the problems being surfaced by what he has said.   That comment about them practicing one way and then abandoning that when they'd get on the game floor was very disturbing.    Was Stevens that out of control of this team?

So If Kyrie is tops to blame for this season, does he get all the credit for last seasons incredible run with him on the court?

I mean he led the team to the highest win percentage the team has seen since the 2010 season.

Sure.  He certainly deserves massive credit for helping us get to our 39-21 record in the 60 games that he played that year.

It was actually 46-21 when Kyrie was shut down. His last game was vs Indiana, game 67 of the season (his 60th). Unless you mean just the 60 games he played in, which was 41-19.

[Androslav]

The more I remember Rozier playing like he did and acting like he is, the more I appreciate Jaylen Brown. Brown struggled with his role, but he adapted and drowned out all the negativity and drama and turned into the best player version of himself in the process. After Brown healed up after being injured and relegated to the bench, he turned things around. He, Al and Morris were the team's best players in the playoffs.

And Brown isn't throwing people under the bus. He didn't complain about what happened. And he showed, he is a professional. Even his public push back of Kyrie's public criticism of the youth, in hindsight, shows better leadership than anything Kyrie did publicly.

TP. Brown is a keeper.
Defense, 3's, has some driving potential, athleticism, brains - that's a very good, and surprisingly rare mix.

[ozgod]

The more I remember Rozier playing like he did and acting like he is, the more I appreciate Jaylen Brown. Brown struggled with his role, but he adapted and drowned out all the negativity and drama and turned into the best player version of himself in the process. After Brown healed up after being injured and relegated to the bench, he turned things around. He, Al and Morris were the team's best players in the playoffs.

And Brown isn't throwing people under the bus. He didn't complain about what happened. And he showed, he is a professional. Even his public push back of Kyrie's public criticism of the youth, in hindsight, shows better leadership than anything Kyrie did publicly.

TP. Brown is a keeper.
Defense, 3's, has some driving potential, athleticism, brains - that's a very good, and surprisingly rare mix.

Also had a willingness to accept criticism...God knows he was the most yelled-at player (by his teammates) this season.

[esel1000]

The more I remember Rozier playing like he did and acting like he is, the more I appreciate Jaylen Brown. Brown struggled with his role, but he adapted and drowned out all the negativity and drama and turned into the best player version of himself in the process. After Brown healed up after being injured and relegated to the bench, he turned things around. He, Al and Morris were the team's best players in the playoffs.

And Brown isn't throwing people under the bus. He didn't complain about what happened. And he showed, he is a professional. Even his public push back of Kyrie's public criticism of the youth, in hindsight, shows better leadership than anything Kyrie did publicly.

TP. Brown is a keeper.
Defense, 3's, has some driving potential, athleticism, brains - that's a very good, and surprisingly rare mix.

Also had a willingness to accept criticism...God knows he was the most yelled-at player (by his teammates) this season.

Absolutely. Whether AD is here or not Brown hopefully won’t be traded... I still think he has star potential.

Can’t wait for the day (hopefully soon) Rozier isn’t wearing a Celts jersey.