NBA players are human beings and they have to go through adversity that most fans don’t think about through the NBA season. It’s hard enough to compete at the highest athletic level in basketball, but factor in things like travel, moving, family, and friends and managing everything would be pretty difficult, even with a team of folks to help you.
Toronto Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry did the best he could, reversing some of the prior opinions of him as a choker in the playoffs. That included showing up for Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals against the Golden State Warriors and scoring 26 points to go with 10 assists and seven rebounds.
According to Toronto’s Danny Green, Lowry did all this despite his grandmother having recently passed away. Lowry powered through, and the Raptors took home the Larry O’Brien trophy.
Via Yahoo!:“The crazy thing is - nobody knew this - he kind of did it, he kept it under wraps and nobody knew but I think his grandmother had passed,” Green said of Lowry.
“I meant to send him a text to send him my condolences. Nobody knew about it and he continued to play, and play really well with that probably on his mind, on his back, or whatever. He came out aggressive in the way we needed him to.”
Lowry confirmed to Green after the show was recorded that his grandmother died.I think we get caught up in thinking this is NBA 2k19 too often, wishing players would perform accurate to their ratings consistently, without fail, night-to-night. That they’re able to mostly do as much in the face of, you know, actually being human beings gets lost on us a bit.