A lot has been made or is being made over Yahoo Sports' article on Seth Curry and the Duke Basketball team moving on from last year. In case you missed it, the article essentially touches on how last year's team at times lacked a closeness or camaraderie, something that most Duke teams typically never fail to have with a leader like Mike Krzyzewski.
You didn't have to be a Duke graduate to see that there was something off about last year's team and many point the finger to Austin Rivers. I myself have said and written about how Curry deferred to Rivers too much, but that can easily be said for most of the team last year.
Still the author's contention that Curry didn't like Rivers or that he was somehow taking a "not so subtle jab" at him appears to be more of a manufactured much ado about nothing in my opinion.
Perhaps Curry didn't like Rivers all that much or vice versa. Perhaps there were chemistry issues within the locker room that prevented us from seeing the best Duke team possible. But to claim that Curry or any Blue Devils would attack a teammate or former teammate is completely failing to understand the culture that Krzyzewski has established at Duke.
There are many fans who loved Rivers, and many others that loathed him but to claim that anything that Curry said in an interview with another author could be construed as a shot across the bow is just plain speculative at best.
The most compelling comments that were used to justify this claim are that Curry said that this Duke team appears to "like each other" and that last season they (the team) "were not close."
There is nothing there damning Rivers as a teammate, at least to me. And it would be one thing if the guy writing this piece was the one who actually interviewed Curry and could provide a little extra context from the body language or facial expressions when asked about Rivers, but it wasn't the same guy.
To my knowledge the guy wasn't even present when those questions were asked and answered. He is taking a widely known idea that Rivers wasn't a good teammate and wasn't popular with all fans and trying to make it look like, Curry, a former team captain, was going after him in a subtle way.
Again, this to me shows nothing but pandering to a sect that didn't/don't like Rivers and showing a failure to understand a Krzyzewski run team.
Regardless of your personal feelings toward a teammate you don't publicly come out and take shots at him. The 1991 and 1992 team apparently didn't always like each other either but they won championships.
Perhaps I was too young to realize there was some animosity there but I didn't know of that fact until years later. Any real or perceived grudges had either been resolved or softened by time they spoke about them, so only the recollections were told with muted passions.
If Curry in fact was speaking of Rivers or blaming him he didn't come out and say it. If he had I would have been extremely disappointed in him. Not because I was Rivers' biggest fan, but because that simply isn't the Duke way.
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