We don't want our players being HONEST with the media. We want them to be good little soldiers and talk the party line because that is what is best for the Celtics. Causing disruption due to comments to the media for selfish reasons is not how you win championships, no matter how small. If he had made the right comment then this thing would be put to bed. It will be real easy for a reporter later in the season if he has a few games of DNP's or small minutes to bring this up again trying to make a big thing out of a small thing. If the Celtics win a championship this year I don't CARE whether he plays even one minute. It's not about him. His response was about HIM.
Okay, you stand on the side of Falseness. That's your choice. I'll stand with Truth. The funny thing is, the people standing on the side of Falseness (advocating a politically correct non-answer) are the same ones claiming this is a 'disruption' and worrying about the 'distractions' it'll cause. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies.
You can be truthful and stay faithful to the team. Those two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. Baby's response was about him, because the question was about him and how he's fitting into the larger team fabric. And don't forget his answer--he said it will be a struggle going from starter's minutes to reserve minutes, but that it was great to be a part of a great team. That sounds like a honest man who knows his sacrifice will be as great as his reward.
This all boils down to emotions and honesty. Baby's an emotional player and he uses that emotion to give him an edge over his opponents. But the thing with emotions is that if you have them and don't express them, they begin to exert control over you. That's where honesty comes in. If you're an emotional person, you need to be honest about them when you have them. Baby recognizes the pull between individual glory and team success; he recognizes his desire to be a star, and his desire to be a part of something greater than himself and so by expressing those honest, personal emotions, he's able to control them and funnel them to use in a team context. If you listen to KG (another player who relies on his emotions for his 'edge'), you'll hear the same dichotomy.
I like how we stand on the side of truth and want 100% complete honesty our of our 3rd string backup PF/C however we don't expect the same thing out of the President of the United States… I know that's a different thread, however it is related.
This isn't the appropriate forum for that topic, EJ. Let's just say that I appreciate honesty across the board, yet I'm not naive enough to expect it in politics--because politics is a game of subtle manipulation where honesty is but one means of getting what you want. But, just like in poker, there's no sense in ever showing your cards. Like any game, there's no morality--it's all about results. Just like I don't expect Doc to be 'honest' and tell us his game plan before the game happens, I don't expect Obama to come out and tell us what he really wants before he gets it.
I don't want BBD to lie to the media. I want him to avoid the question and what I said he ought to have responded with was exactly that. If pushed he needed to have walked away.
Yeah, but you don't want Baby to be honest either. I think your problem is that you expect some kind of military-style toe-the-line attitude from the players. But they're not robots, or even soldiers. Especially in the case of Baby (and other emotional players), I don't know how you can expect them to turn on and off their emotions, expecting them to act like robots off the court, yet wanting them completely different on the court.
Further, what he actually said wasn't that [dang]ing, or surprising, or even potentially divisive to the team as a whole. You warn us about 'distractions' and those who want to 'make a story out of this,' but in reality you're warning us about guys like yourself, guys that find fault and distraction and big stories every time someone has the gall to shown an ounce of humanity. Baby opened up about his inner struggle to put team ahead of the individual (a struggle he's overcome about 99% of the time), and now he's taking heat for
actually putting himself before the team.
It's because of people that extrapolate bad motive from innocent displays of human uncertainty that we've increasingly moved to a say-nothing, politically correct society of emotionally repressed automatons. If we all grew up just a little, maybe we'd learn to embrace the ambiguity inherent in life, instead of trying to extinguish it at the expense of the very things that make us human.
