"It was like, 'if we're not going to make a run at this championship, then while I'm still young I want a chance to be able to do everything I can do.' I felt like I was playing a role, and I was. "Yeah, going into the season (the style concerns) were part of the reason why (his willingness to be traded) came up," he said. But Gay wanted to win, too, and the Grizzlies – who were 41-25 in the lockout-shortened season in 2012-13 – had become one of the most respected and feared teams around. For years, the rumblings had grown that he wanted more freedom to fly on the offensive end, his scoring stymied by the inside-out brand of basketball that Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol played so well. Yet when it comes to the obvious disconnect between Gay's individual goals and the Grizzlies' winning style, it's clear he was conflicted. Obviously financial stuff goes on, but when you build a team like that you have to see it through." There's not too many times when you can build a team like that. We were playing so great as a team, it kind of made me feel like this is it. "And this was with Chris Wallace (the general manager who remains but who is no longer involved like he was under former owner Michael Heisley) … I wanted to see it through, because we started so well. I said this team has a chance to be a competitor in the West, and we're going to be good, but if you plan on doing anything – this is the summer before – I said I want to express to you that I may be wanting to move on. "I never went to any of (the new management) and told them that I wanted to be traded. "It was a total shock to me," he said of the trade. Yet while it has been reported that Gay was happy to get out of Memphis, he said both that and the idea that he definitely wouldn't re-sign with the Grizzlies wasn't true. As a result, his market value (which they claim was void of other serious suitors to begin with) may have dried up when interested teams were forced to consider the notion of having Gay on a one-year rental deal in which he may have had considerable leverage. Waiting until the summer, they feared, could lead to Gay's perceived intentions to leave town becoming more widely known. Two distinct differences in opinion have since become clear here: the new Grizzlies' executives who watched from a distance as Memphis fell in the first round to the Clippers last May didn't view this team as the sort of championship contender that Gay and some others believed it to be, nor did they see him as worthy of the monstrous money he was due.
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Grizzlies officials were of the belief that Gay would likely opt out in the summer of 2014 and leave as a free agent, and Gay himself admits that he expressed a willingness to be traded last summer before new owner Robert Pera took over and made CEO Jason Levien his chief decision-maker. What the Grizzlies did and why, meanwhile, still doesn't sit well with him.ĭespite the popular narrative that this was simply a money-dump on the part of the Grizzlies as they became the latest team to fall in line with the new collective bargaining agreement, a way to get off the $38 million owed to Gay if he played out the final two seasons of his deal, it was never quite that simple. I'm so thankful for the city doing what they've done for me up until now." "There were a lot of people in Memphis and a lot of relationships I left in Memphis that I'll always have. "Obviously that was just out of a little bit of anger," Gay said.
But when Gay shared his frustrations by telling a Toronto sports radio station that there was "nothing" he would miss about Memphis, he knew he'd gone too far. The Grizzlies, who are 5-2 since trading Gay and being joined by new players Tayshaun Prince, Ed Davis and Austin Daye, were 29-15 when the deal went down.