Alvin Gentry's Reaction To Landing Zion Was Pure Elation
Few coaches in the NBA had as rough a 2018-19 season as Alvin Gentry. He entered the year with a team that made a little bit of postseason noise the previous year after sweeping Portland, and they entered the season projected to win in the mid to high 40s and maybe snag a top 4 seed if things got crazy. Anthony Davis was healthy, they brought in Julius Randle who showed real promise, hell they even started 4-0. Then they lost 6 in a row and would hover around .500/just under .500 the rest of the way until things eventually boiled over with Anthony Davis. It’s never a good spot to be as a coach when your best player and franchise talent who has 2 years left on his deal demands a trade. Immediately your team is cooked, guys check out and things turn into a disaster. You could see during the whole fiasco how much it was weighing on Gentry. A casualty of LeBron and Rich Paul’s master plan that would ultimately fail.
So while there are sad fans and executives around the league right now because they missed out on Zion, Alvin Gentry deserves it. That’s why his reaction is so awesome. It was almost like he couldn’t believe what he heard at first and took a minute to let everything sink in. That whole room is DEAD and Gentry doesn’t let that phase him one bit. He’s going to peacock all over the place because he got the golden ticket. The biggest prospect since LeBron after getting sort of boned by real life LeBron during the year. That’s the NBA the Basketball Gods doing that man a favor. I suppose if things turn out in a way that AD still gets moved, at least Gentry has a pretty good consolation prize. Considering they had just a 6% chance to pull that off, you won’t see a more genuine reaction than that. How about doing that right in that Knicks dude’s face too. Talk about rubbing salt on an open wound.
The good news is now when Alvin Gentry is forced to drink beers after the game they’ll be happy beers because chances are Zion will have done something incredible
Good for him.