Because I haven't written about loyalty enough already:
This is for those of you who may be upset or angry about superstar loyalty - angry about AD wanting out of New Orleans, or KD wanting out of OKC, or Kyrie wanting out of Cleveland, or Paul George wanting out of Indiana, or Kawhi wanting out of San Antonio... (man there's been a lot of these recently). Imagine right out of college or high school you get a job at some company doing what you love. After seven or eight years you've gotten really damn good at your job, and people in your industry recognize you for it. You're due to get a raise soon, but while you've had a great experience at your current company, you've gone through some rough patches and haven't had the elite management or coworkers around you that you hoped for coming into the workforce. On top of that your rivals have been beating you (in whatever system your field uses to approximate success) and you can't help but turn an eye to companies that have bigger name recognition or are more well-run. Okay, NBA players have the distinction of sporting millions of fans and followers and multi-million dollar salaries. And sure, having your maybe-tampering agent tell the world you want out ten days before the deadline certainly hurts likeability, but I feel like in all the Twitter punditry hullabaloo we tend to overlook the fact that these guys are just regular humans dealing with all the same decisions and shit that we deal with - just on an even more inflated scale.
If this is some unwritten thing everyone just understands and doesn't really talk about that much, then by all means please shout me down! If there's some implicit agreement I don't know about, I want to know. I just haven't really heard this particular analogy all that much, especially among the media circus of the last few years - though LeBron's The Letter definitely swayed some people (everything this dude does gotta be capitalized or something seriously) and Stephen A. Smith has almost certainly expressed an argument along those lines on First Take. I question AD's timing as much as anybody, but who knows what led him to make his decision and when? Let's give players the benefit of the doubt until we know everything about the situation.
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