It’s not a secret that basketball is a business. Therefore, team owners and General Managers often take a business-first approach and consider their players to be assets rather than actual human beings.
They’re constantly trading people away and forcing them to move on short notice -or no notice at all. They juggle around with their contracts and their lives and more often than not they don’t have a say in that.
That’s why CJ McCollum wanted to stand out for the players and the way they’re often treated by teams.
In an appearance in The Woj Pod with Adrian Wojnarowski, he pointed out how the Miami Heat waited until the eleventh hour to offer Kendrick Nunn a deal. That way, he would have to settle for less money to come back with them:
“The Kendrick Nunn situation,” McCollum told Woj, via Brad Sullivan of Heat Nation. “He was gonna be a free agent. They basically waited until the money dried up, right? You correct me if I’m wrong. Have you (Wojnarowski) seen this happening in the league and not being discussed at all? Where they talk about players forcing their way out, player movement. But then what about the manipulation that goes into some of these situations where teams are waiting for the market to dry up before they release a player’s rights.”
The situation backfired as Nunn ended up signing with the Los Angeles Lakers instead. But the way the Heat handled his contract cost him a lot of money.
At the end of the day, the media will only talk about how poorly a player handles his situation and how it wants to force his way out of a team but they rarely talk about how poorly a team could treat the player. It’s just the way it goes.
