Gary Neal: 'You've got to go where the checks are'
Two summers ago, Gary Neal voluntarilly forfeited the opportunity to chase a championship by signing with the Milwaukee Bucks instead of re-signing with the San Antonio Spurs — €”the team that made him an NBA player.
Ever since, Neal has bounced around the league, and he's currently coming off the bench for the 14-51 Minnesota Timberwolves. Before yesterday's game against his first team, Neal conducted a lengthy Q&A with San Antonio Express-News reporter Jeff McDonald. He touched on many things, including how it can be hard to stay with one team and the main reason he decided to leave the Spurs when he did.
Q: But that’s kind of the NBA, right? Not everybody can be Tim Duncan. Neal: “To be honest, if you’re not a franchise guy … you look at everybody who’s been in the league for an extended period of time, they’ve played for four, five, six teams. That’s the way the NBA is. Everybody’s not blessed enough to be Tim, Manu and Tony. You’ve got to go where the checks are.” ... Q: Take me back to your free-agent summer of 2013 and how that went down with leaving the Spurs? Neal: “It was a situation where, I’d just seen DeJuan (Blair) go through a situation of kind of being demoted — him playing the games and being a starter, playing in the rookie-sophomore game, and then all of a sudden he was out of the rotation. Me being an older guy, getting a late start, that was kind of on my mind. The Spurs had offered me and Tiago (Splitter) the qualifying offer at the same time. My agent was kind of going back and forth with them, with the qualifying offer only being like a million dollars (it was $1.1 million), could you kind of let Gary just, you know, go make some money? That was in the works like a week after the Finals was over. They took the qualifying offer off the table after three or four weeks. So I went to Milwaukee.”After making 39.8 percent of his three-pointers in three seasons with San Antonio, Neal's effectiveness from the outside has dropped. In games played for the Bucks, Timberwolves and Charlotte Hornets, he's only shot 34.2 percent from behind the three-point line.
And despite going from a winning situation to one not quite as bright, Neal's playing time never went up and his role did not change. But the money was right. Who's to argue with someone trying to make as much as he can?
(h/t: San Antonio Express-News)