Kyle Lowry was not a fan of the Toronto Raptors buying and selling DeMar DeRozan for Kawhi Leonard again in 2018.
In reality, he was so bothered by the trade that he mainly remoted himself from the team for the primary chunk of the 2018-19 season, in accordance with former Raptors player Danny Green.
“Beginning of the year, [Lowry] wasn’t rocking with the organization. They traded DeMar, and he wasn’t f*cking with anybody,” Green stated on a recent episode of the No Fouls Given podcast. “We began our coaching camp/preseason in Vancouver, and we began working our approach by Canada, and we did not see [Lowry].
“He came on his own and left on his own, so he wasn’t on the bus with the team… We’d see him at practice, but he’d be there early, he’d be off in his own corner doing his own workouts. He’d practice with us too, but he just wasn’t rocking with the coaching staff or front office at the time.”
Green stated it got here to a degree the place then-head coach Nick Nurse approached him and different veteran gamers to resolve the scenario. The eventual resolution introduced forth by Nurse was an intervention along with his teammates.
Green stated just a few members of the management group needed to sit down with Lowry to attempt to flip issues round.
“Me, Kawhi, I think we had Jonas Valančiūnas, us older guys, we had to sit down and talk to Kyle about him being more a part of the group,” Green stated. “We had moments in the course of the season the place it was like intervention-type sh*t about him, speaking about him whereas he was within the room. This is like, ‘yo, we gotta get Kyle to f*cking try this,’ whereas he was sitting proper there. That sort of sh*t.
“He was a great teammate. He’d f*ck with us, but coaching staff, front office, he let it be known, ‘I’m not rocking with y’all right now.'”
It’s a superb factor that Lowry ultimately got here round, as he would wind up being an important piece to the Raptors’ championship run that season.
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