The “We should have kept Rozier” stuff is also recency bias. He was terrific in 2018 but shot his way out of town the following year, clearly playing as someone who felt he should be starting and generally driving all of us nuts at the time by jacking up shots and trying to put up numbers. He also, IIRC, did a bunch of interviews complaining about his playing time that did him no favors.
All of which is to say, despite how good of a fit Rozier’s skill set in hindsight would have been for this team, he wasn’t coming back, and nobody was saying at the time we should pay him big dollars to come back and let Kyrie walk. Nor were they saying it midsession while Kyrie was on Tinder with Durant – or really even when we S/T’d him to Charlotte for Kemba. Yes, I'm sure a few posters were saying that they’d rather take a flier on Rozier than signing Kemba to a max. But no one had been advocating for it previously.
FWIW, Tatum was actually on
JJ Redick’s podcast recently and talked about how much they both loved Rozier. He was also saying how trying that year was – and how everyone from the year before, himself included, was putting their own personal goals ahead of the team’s. He said he thought the real shame was that, unlike the previous year where he thought they’d have gotten smoked by Golden State, he believed the 2019 Celtics team was the most talented healthy team in the league (Warriors were hurt that year) but that they couldn’t pull it together to take advantage.
Lots of good stuff in there, worth watching.
