Power to the players.
In the three major cases of players wanting to get out of town on Thursday’s NBA trade deadline, those individuals went 3-for-3.
Their deadline day graded out as an A-plus.
Reggie Jackson, Enes Kanter and Goran Dragic were there own general managers, the latter two kicking up enough dust to force deals those teams didn’t necessarily want to make. Jackson expressed a desire early in the season to start and play major minutes — and be paid like it.
Oklahoma City wasn’t going for that.
And so Jackson pressed … and was finally set free, to Detroit.
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Kanter and Dragic? Masterpieces.
Each one materialized late, and each had the same story — dwindling minutes, a diminishing role — and they weren’t going to sit and take it lightly. In fact, they didn’t sit at all. They took their message to the organization and then to the media. And while the comments made by Kanter (traded from Utah to Oklahoma City) were standard fare, Dragic’s were remarkable.
Of the Suns’ front office, Dragic told reporters: “I don’t trust them anymore. It happens too many times. Two, three times. They give promises, OK. It’s hard. But at the same time, I wish them all the best. They were great to me the past five years. … I just hit that point of my career that it’s better for me and my family to move on.”
He wasn’t done.
“I don’t feel comfortable with my situation,” he said. “It’s just different. Standing in the corner, it’s not my game. I see that we’re not going the right direction. That’s why I take action and try to put myself in a better position.”
They were as condemning as statements get about the competency of the individuals running an organization. In Denver, some media and a faction of fans think they see that. In Phoenix, you had a player actually saying that. And the NBA is full of players who speak their minds. No other league’s athletes speak as freely as the NBA’s do.
So Phoenix shipped Dragic to the Heat. And then, in some small way, that proved Dragic right.
The Suns’ signing of guard Isaiah Thomas last summer was the move that created the problems. First, Thomas expressed disillusionment at his role early in the season. Then Dragic got so fed up, he simply wanted out.
So Phoenix, which was told it was not going to be able to re-sign Dragic, had to deal him.
And then the Suns traded Thomas, which essentially validated Dragic’s claim that what they tried to do in fact wasn’t the right course.
The sobering reality of that situation is if Phoenix never wanted to experiment with three guards and “ultra-small ball,” if it never would have signed Thomas in the first place, it would still have a happy Dragic, who was a third-team all-NBA player last season.
That’s how thin the line is sometimes between love and hate.
But it also underscores a lesson to the league’s general managers: If you have a player coming to the end of his contract that you want to keep, you’d better keep him happy. Because players have never been so dialed into their power and never have they had so much leverage to get themselves into situations that suit them better.
These three are the latest, but not the last. Wheeling and dealing has gone, in earnest, from a one-way street to a shared experience.
Christopher Dempsey: cdempsey@denverpost.comor dempseypost
