This week on the Point Forward podcast, Andre Iguodala and special guest P.J. Tucker cleared up some misconceptions about times in the past where it appeared they were getting in the face of their teammates.
Drama is part of what makes sports, and oftentimes a veteran chewing out a big-name player gets tons of play on social media without most fans understanding the context. Both Tucker and Iguodala experienced this, with clips of them going viral by chewing out Joel Embiid and Andrew Wiggins respectively.
The knee-jerk reaction is typically to say it’s ridiculous that veterans would scream at young stars, particularly when they’re playing well — but that fails to understand the dynamic of a team or locker room. In both cases the experience was the same, with the veterans trying to hype-up their teammates, rather than criticize them.
“Breathing energy into your star players is part of the role,” Tucker says. “Everybody’s talking about that clip when I was cursing them out — but I’m like ‘what are we doing? Bro, get the f***ing ball — you know what I’m saying?”
The point here is that it’s not about saying “you’re doing something wrong,” but rather “you are elite, time to prove it to them.” There’s different ways of doing this, but a veteran role player is there to support the most talented young players emotionally as much as anything else, because they’ve weathered the storm before.
“I wasn’t yelling at Wiggs,” Iguodala clarifies. “I’m really telling Wiggins ‘bro, you really him. You screened seven times? Get through all of them. Get through the screens fam.’” Iguodala explains that part of being a young star is getting overwhelmed with everything. For a lot of these players not only do they need to keep their play up on the court, but contend with the noise off of it. A veteran can cut through that distraction, speak directly to a player and snap them back into the moment where they let their game take over.
It’s fascinating to hear NBA players talk like this, because on TV without players mic’d up we so often confuse any emotion on the court as anger, when often it has a different purpose. Maybe next time we’ll all pause and consider whether it’s motivation, not anger that leads to a veteran screaming at a young player.
You can listen to the full episode of the Point Forward podcast with P.J. Tucker here.
