Yesterday I was blunt, perhaps even cynical, about Hayward's injury. As a fan, I won't apologize. His handling of his free agency was poor to say the least.
That said, today, for the first time, I watched the play on a big screen. Last night, I only saw it on my phone as I was putting my son to sleep. Having now seen it though on a tv, like most everyone else, I'll say, it was gruesome. Just absolutely awful. I have no idea why the pass was thrown or why he jumped for it (as he's not THAT athletic) or why he didn't sort of brace himself or look where he was landing since he was in traffic, but that doesn't matter. It was awful and Hayward seems like a guy who busts his butt perhaps harder than anyone to improve his body and his craft. Year over year he's improved. I think he truly plays to win and so it stinks. He also seems like a pretty solid human being and decent family man. From everything we know about him anyway. Is he a little bit of a loner, and could he have handled free agency better? Yes, of course. But he's human. All of us are. We are imperfect creatures who on most days make bad decisions. And once we do, we sometimes feel uncomfortable and aren't sure how to handle it. This compounds the problem. And we've all done this. Many a time in life. Sure, Hayward had handlers to help him with the free agency process and yes he had years to think about exactly how to handle it. But that doesn't change the fact that decisions can be tough and not always handled well.
Because we're human. All of us. And so as a human being, I feel guilty about my tone yesterday. And I want to apologiE for that while also acknowledging how mature nearly everyone here was. More mature than me, that's for sure. And I'm proud of that.
Many here used the word karma yesterday. And I'm not typing this for karmatic reasons but I think we really could be in store for some good karma based on how collectively well we responded to Hayward's injury yesterday.
So good job, guys. I'm proud to be a Jazz fan.
Let's ****ing go.