Royce White would have been our Draymond Green

Fantasma Negro · Jun 8, 2016

Let's see what BeasGod with a full training camp looks like

bulkatron · Jun 8, 2016

Patman87 said: ↑

Let's see what BeasGod with a full training camp looks like
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Probably the same as Beasgod with no camp haha.

BleedRocketsRed · Jun 8, 2016

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I'm really enjoying this <a href="https://twitter.com/nyknicks">@nyknicks</a> mini-camp. I've met so many legends and good people in the last 24 hours. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Refreshing?src=hash">#Refreshing</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TriangleOffense?src=hash">#TriangleOffense</a></p>— Royce A. White (@Highway_30) <a href="https://twitter.com/Highway_30/status/740691548426358784">June 8, 2016</a></blockquote>
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coachbadlee · Jun 8, 2016

Commodore said: ↑

couldn't get through to him sadly

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LMAO! Excellent!

napalm06 · Jun 9, 2016

dragician said: ↑

this is what Royce sees whenever he dunks the basketball...

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Think Royce White can dunk after eating doughnuts and spamming twitter for a few years?

CDrex · Jun 9, 2016

If he only had a brain, a heart, and the nerve.

roslolian · Jun 9, 2016

WTF is this thread? First of all character is everything the talent factor doesn't matter if the dude is bat**** crazy or just lazy, or in White's case both. Secondly his talent is not that amazing, at least compared to other notorious headcases like Rodman, Rasheed Wallace, Iverson etc.

Those guys at least possessed max-level talent so even if they didn't have passion for the game or didn't work hard they were still able to produce for a time. In White's case apart from his mental issues he wasn't that athletic, he was undersized and he had no range, all he really had was passing skills which were intriguing but not really enough to warrant a spot.

White could never be our Draymond Green because mentally Green is the opposite of what White is, a hard-working, driven and multi-faceted big man who can do almost everything well.

Amiga · Jun 9, 2016

Let it go, Morey.

Kruze10 · Jun 9, 2016

Royce White would have been our Draymond Green....

At kicking dudes in the nuts.

okierock · Jun 9, 2016

Royce White is like Draymond Green with no color.

topfive · Jun 9, 2016

And Malick Badiane could have been our Kevin Garnett.

danoman · Jun 9, 2016

And Terrence Jones would have been our version of Terrence Jones.

asianballa23 · Jun 9, 2016

heypartner said: ↑

Are you saying Draymond Green is a sane-man's Royce White?

Which begs they question, since Lin was insane as a Knick, was he likewise a sane-man's Linsanity.
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I see how you like to troll...

ApuN · Jun 10, 2016

"OP be trollin' "

J.R. · Jun 13, 2016

"I want to play at the top level," White said. "And I should be able to. If we go back and talk about who I got drafted with, we talk about who's shining now, like Draymond (Green), who I love. I love his game. Again, you can't put more irony in a story than mine. You talk about two players who are the hybrid, new looking four man. Who are you talking about? You're talking about Draymond Green. And when he was in college, there was only one other player who led his team in every statistic. And he led his in four; I actually led mine in five. That was me."
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That dichotomy was at the heart of White's problems with Houston. But despite getting there two months early to begin workouts and living in Texas with his advisor, James Walker -- Walker married White's mother's cousin, and has known him since he was 7 -- White never got on the court for the Rockets. His relationship with the team and general manager Daryl Morey disintegrated as they tried to address how to work through his disorder in a way that would allow him to play.

But White came to believe the Rockets did not serve him well. According to him:

1. the Rockets said that White had to go to a psychiatrist every day, even though that is generally not recommended as a treatment protocol for anyone dealing with mental health issues, including those who suffered from severe mental health problems such as schizophrenia;

2. the team-recommended psychiatrist told White that he had informed the team that he didn't recommend White come to him every day, but that the team informed the psychiatrist that if White didn't see him every day, the team would fine White, and that the psychiatrist felt obligated to inform White of that fact;

3. the team and White, White says, agreed to a protocol that laid out a basic plan for treatment going forward. He says the protocol was signed by White's personal physician, Dr. Mary Wilkens, the psychiatrist working with White, Dr. Aaron Fink, and the Rockets' medical team physician, Dr. James Muntz. However, at a December, 2012 meeting of the parties, Morey said that the team was not aware when it drafted White that he suffered from anxiety disorder at the time he was drafted.

Yet in a subsequent conversation between White and Muntz, Muntz said the team did know that White had anxiety disorder, having received his medical records from Iowa State before the team drafted him.

4. the Rockets' outside counsel, Michael Goldberg, subsequently took over as the team's representative in discussions with White. In one of the discussions that took place in order to try and keep the matter from going to arbitration, Goldberg said that if White signed an agreement with the team that avoided arbitration, he would assist White in trying to develop a more comprehensive mental health policy going forward. White agreed and signed, but was subsequently traded to the 76ers in the summer of 2013.

Walker spent all summer in Texas with White. He was at every workout, to the point where the Rockets had him help with working out some of the players. He says after White suffered back spasms and missed a week just before camp, the relationship with the team started to change.

"His doctor in Minnesota, she talked to me, too," Walker said. "She said, 'what are they doing for his anxiety?' I said, 'they're not doing anything.' And she talked to Royce. She also talked to Royce, she said 'how do you feel?' Royce was like, I don't know. They didn't want to talk to her. They wanted to deal with their own doctor. They didn't want to talk to her and they really didn't deal with Royce ... they just kind of brushed him off and he shut down."

The Rockets did not wish to respond publicly to White's claims, saying only through a team attorney that they wished him the best going forward. They do maintain that while White may have believed a protocol agreement between the team and him was in place, they are not in possession of one, or of a draft of one. Sources say the team did agree to several of White's requests during the negotiations, including the use of a bus to get to games, and hiring a personal trainer and nutritionist. Ultimately, though, they could never find enough common ground for White to return to the court, after playing for the Rockets' summer league team.

The Rockets liked, and like, White personally, the sources said. And professionally, they invested a high Draft pick in him; selfishly, if for no other reason, they hoped it would work out. And, at least they gave it a shot. But that is the frustration. It didn't work out. White lost trust in Morey and the team, and felt he was made out to be a selfish person with unrealistic intentions through subsequent stories about his dealings with the team.

"How is it a special privilege to go from a private plane, with your teammates, with food and everything that you could ask for, drive right up to the plane and the gate and you don't have to go through any security, how is it special treatment for me to say, you know what, I'm going to go the long route?," he asked. "Ain't nothing special about it. I don't need to take the private jet; I don't need to take the team-owned plane with the catered service. I'll take the bus. Give me a $50 stipend so that I can stop at Applebee's on the way. That's what we were really talking about."

But White does not want his story to just be a rehash of what went wrong in Houston. He is too young a man to tell old men's tales. He needs to start his career, play basketball somewhere, see if he can make a go of it professionally in a world that is still trying to figure out how to best serve the needs of people like him.
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Does NBA have right plan for mental health going forward?

Can the NBA and its teams find better ways to help players suffering from mental illness?

He has thought about what it will be like when he gets on the court again.

"Playing is definitely important," Royce White was saying. "I think my experience has made it a very emotional piece of my life. I'd be an emotional wreck if I ever got the uniform back on."

He does not mean that literally. He is thinking about when he got the NCAA Tournament in 2012, when he was playing for Iowa State, and he looked up in the stands and saw his family, and looked across and saw UConn coach Jim Calhoun, all of the "emotion and anger and fear" came out of him.

"That's how I mustered up enough momentum and energy to come out on that first play and dunk on their whole team," he said. "That's what was going on. So, I know myself. If I was to come back with a team that supported me, and we knew my actual skill was going to show through, man, I'd be a wreck before that game started. But once it started, I'd find my rhythm and get over it. But it's a very emotional thing for me."

It has been more than four years since Royce White played in that college game. He is still hoping to get into his first NBA game, four years after the Houston Rockets took him No. 16 overall in the 2012 Draft. But White never played for Houston, as he and the team struggled to agree on the best course of action to deal with White's mental illness. He was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers in the summer of 2013, and released before the start of that season.

Other than two 10-day contracts with the Sacramento Kings in 2014 and discussions with the Denver Nuggets in the summer of '14 that didn't get very far, he's still waiting for a shot.

He believes the NBA's lack of a comprehensive mental health policy, and a subsequent inability to deal with mental illness, or with anyone else's, is one of the biggest reasons why he's still waiting.

But this is not a search for heroes or villains. White isn't all wrong or right, and neither were the Rockets or the league. The reality is that the NBA, like a lot of private companies, and families, and communities, struggles with serving and helping people with mental illness.

There have been too many players who've struggled mightily, and publicly, with different types of mental health problems in the past few years, with few positive outcomes. Among them are ex-Milwaukee Bucks center Larry Sanders, former Cleveland Cavaliers guard Delonte West, Los Angeles Lakers forward Metta World Peace, former Boston Celtics guard Keyon Dooling and former Rockets and Timberwolves forward Eddie Griffin, who died in a car crash at age 25 in 2007.

Former WNBA star Chamique Holdsclaw made a documentary this year that details her battles with severe depression. NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West documented his lifelong battle with depression in his autobiography, detailing suicidal and homicidal thoughts that tormented him throughout his life and ripped away much of the joy he took from playing. But West says he basically treated himself.

"I was a 15-year-old kid growing up in Minnesota when Eddie Griffin died," White said. "I don't care if an NBA player doesn't commit suicide, or doesn't have some extreme psychosis or doesn't commit some crime that suggest mental health issues. I don't care if that doesn't happen for the next 30 years. It doesn't mean it is safe today."

At 25, White could be entering the prime of his career. Instead, after taking part in a veterans' minicamp with the New York Knicks last week that included Anthony Bennett, the former No. 1 overall pick in the 2013 Draft, White is still looking for the right NBA fit, while continuing his advocacy for improving and enhancing mental health programs -- starting with the NBA.

"Of course I want to play," White said a couple of weeks ago. "But why am I not playing? Let's have that conversation."

White suffers from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), defined by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) as a condition where patients "experience excessive anxiety and worry, often expecting the worst even when there is no apparent reason for concern. They anticipate disaster and may be overly concerned about money, health, family, work, or other issues." A person is diagnosed with GAD when these symptoms appear more often than not over a six-month period. According to ADAA, 6.8 million adults, or 3.1 percent of the U.S. population, are affected by GAD in a particular year.

According to the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health, there were, in 2014, an estimated 43.6 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States that had suffered from some form of mental illness in the past year. That number represented more than 18 percent of all U.S. adults. NIMH also estimated 9.8 million adults aged 18 or older -- 4.2 percent of all U.S. adults -- had a serious mental illness in 2014.

NIMH defines a serious mental illness as a mental, behavioral or emotional disorder outside of substance use disorders or developmental disorders that results in "serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities."

White takes medication for his condition. He had encouraging conversations with the Knicks' new coach, Jeff Hornacek, during last week's camp. He thinks the triangle offense is "super cool" for any player. And, he waits.

"The biggest thing with Royce is establishing a trust factor with him," said Fred Hoiberg, White's coach at Iowa State and now the Bulls' coach. "As simple as sitting in the office and talking to him. I would talk to him about everything else other than basketball. We talked about music, we talked about politics. That was the biggest thing, establishing a trust factor with him. Once you had that, he would run thru a wall for you."

Many teams utilize psychologists and psychiatrists, but the level of attachment of the doctor to the sinew of the team varies.

The Dallas Mavericks were among the first NBA teams to utilize a full-time psychologist, Don Kalkstein, who's been with the team for 15 years. But Kalkstein doesn't just show up when things go bad. He travels with the team. He sits on the bench. His office is at the team's arena, American Airlines Center.

But that's still the exception rather than the rule.

White's been very consistent in his arguments over the years. He believes the NBA does not have any policies or protocols to specifically deal with anyone -- players, coaches, team employees -- that have mental health issues. He believes that teams should not have decision-making authority over a player's treatment for mental health problems and that those decisions should be made by the player's personal physician and/or outside physicians who specialize in mental health.

And he believes that the NBA, like other businesses, operates in a profit-first mode that doesn't value its employees as much as it does continuing a system that maximizes money instead of, as White puts it, "finding a harmony between humanitarianism and entrepreneurship."

He makes it clear, over the course of two long phone conversations that he does not want to tear down the NBA. He wants to make it better. But he's not going to compromise on how he thinks that can happen.

"Yes, there's ingenuity, and yes, there's profit," he says. "But there's also a compass, a True North, that always points to what's going to help people. In all fairness, the NBA probably has a group of people who believe that that's who they are, too. And there may be a group of people who really are that. I'm not saying Adam Silver is an (expletive). I want you to quote me. I'm not saying David Stern is an (expletive). What I'm saying is they have allowed themselves to become part of a system that does not fully represent what they could be."

Last month, White penned an open letter to the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association, which was co-signed by four physicians who specialize in treating the mentally ill, including White's personal physician, Dr. Mary Wilkens.

"Years ago, the National Basketball Association helped usher in a new movement," White wrote in the letter. "Before, basketball was a game played on almost every street corner; it was a niche sport that received little attention. It was something only known by a few. The League changed this. The League started a movement. This effort is not that dissimilar to mental health. The only difference is that we have not paid attention to mental health in the same way we did to furthering the game."

White is among many dealing with their mental health issues, and forcing those fortunate enough not to have to deal with them personally, in much more public and uncompromising ways than in the past. People who live in the public eye (such as my friend Trenni Kusnierek, a reporter and anchor at Comcast Sports New England) now talk more openly about their problems in an attempt to help others.

World Peace, famously, thanked his psychiatrist after starring in the Lakers' Game 7 NBA Finals win over the Celtics in 2010. He sold his championship ring later that year, raising more than $500,000, to help schools in the L.A. area to hire more mental health workers. He has also been a constant presence over the years at the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA, speaking to residents whose mental illnesses run the gamut from simple to severe.

"I confess I was a little skeptical," said Dr. Tom Strouse, the Medical Director at the Resnick Hospital. "This was something the Lakers had arranged and I didn't know how much of it was good faith. But the guy is real. The sincerity. Once you saw him, all of that (skepticism) went away. He's the only celebrity who's ever done this ... to see him work into the child adolescent unit, which has children as young as five, and see these kids, L.A. kids, to see the expression on their faces, and to sit down and reassure them. One of his core messages is to reject stigma, and ask for some help. It doesn't make you a less good person. One of my colleagues said it was one of the most beautiful psychotherapy sessions he'd ever seen."

Social media outlets are giving a common voice to millions of people worldwide who once hid in the shadows and never told strangers about their conditions. They are "coming out" in their workplaces and demanding employers adhere to the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, which made it illegal to discriminate against an employee with a mental health problem.

The ADA instructs employers to seek what it calls "reasonable accommodation" for employees with mental health problems to perform the essential parts of their jobs, though they may not be able to perform marginal or incidental job functions. It defines reasonable accommodation as "any modification or adjustment to a job or the work environment that will enable a qualified applicant or employee with a disability to participate in the application process or to perform essential job functions. Reasonable accommodation also includes adjustments to assure that a qualified individual with a disability has rights and privileges in employment equal to those of employees without disabilities."

The public tends to focus on mental health issues when the most extreme cases detonate in the form of the mass shootings that have become a sadly regular occurrence in recent years. The latest one is the awful killings at an Orlando night club Saturday, where 50 people died in the worst act of mass murder on U.S. soil since 9/11. But, while horrible, those are outliers, and help maintain the stigma that still plagues people with mental health problems.

White chafes at the incorrect shorthand that has been used to describe his GAD: he can't fly on planes. That wasn't true. He flew several times in college. But he knew there could be times, during the long NBA season, when it would have been better for him to drive.

"He took a trip to Europe," Hoiberg said by phone last week. "He flew to Italy with us and didn't have any issues. The first time Royce came to me and asked if he could drive was the second to last game of the year, at Kansas State. We didn't have a shootaround that game and it was really a short drive. He had his grandfather in town and he said can I drive, and I said okay. He had a great game and played his ass off. Then he said 'what do you think, Coach; can I drive to Missouri?' I said 'damn right you can drive to Missouri.' "

In the first round of the NCAAs, White dominated Connecticut's Andre Drummond -- now the Pistons' hub at center -- with 15 points and 13 rebounds. Iowa State won by 13. In the next round, the Cyclones played a Kentucky team that featured future first-round picks Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Marquis Teague that went on to win the national championship.

"Royce was the best player on the floor," Hoiberg said.

(Before you ask: no, I didn't ask Hoiberg if he'd lobby for Chicago to sign White as a free agent or invite him to camp. Given the sensitivities of what we're dealing with, it wouldn't be fair or right for either one of them to have to deal with such scenarios in public just for a potential story.)

"I talked to Royce two days ago," Hoiberg said. "I had a really good talk with him, talked to him about what direction he wants to go in with his life. He has to take a little bit different path to get back to the NBA level, and that's the big decision he has to make -- how he wants to show he wants to get back to the NBA."

But White is also interested in reinventing the way the league identifies with mental health as a whole. Veterans who return from war with post-traumatic stress disorder obviously have mental health problems. But so do people who abuse drugs, he says. And the NBA's unwilling to couple the two, in his opinion.

"In a second, what's going to end up happening is the shoe's going to drop, and people are going to realize that what I was saying four years ago wasn't farfetched, and it wasn't arrogant. It was just a fact," he says. "There is no mental health policy. They know it, I know it. And the only thing that's going to become obvious now is that, all of the social issues that they seem like they were for, on the surface, underneath they really weren't for, out of their lack of mental health acknowledgment. You can't say you're for anti-gun violence if you don't have a mental health policy."

The difference between White's previous complaints about the NBA's approach is that, now, he has doctors publicly backing him.

"The NBA, in my mind, is just like any other employer," said Dr. Ben Miller, one of the other physicians who co-signed White's letter, and who is the director of the Eugene S. Farley, Jr., Health Policy Center at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.

"If we think about how employers are responsible for their employees, employers buy benefits packages for their employees," Miller said. "I see the NBA and the commission and entities like the NBPA as being like the federal government. I see each individual team as being like a state. Each team/state will buy their own type of benefits. There's not a standard for determining what their minimum amount of benefits are. One team may have a package that has better mental health benefits than other teams."

The league says that while there is not currently a separate and distinct mental health policy enumerated in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, all players have access to mental health professionals and treatment programs as part of their benefits package.

"Each case is obviously individual and not, policy is a little stricter than the word I would probably use," said Kathy Behrens, the NBA's President for Social Responsibility and
Player Programs. "And I also would just take a step back and say that what we've really been focusing on, in addition to the policy and the care, is trying to make sure that players understand how important it is that they avail themselves of these resources, and that they understand that it's not a sign of weakness to say that they might need help."

The league, Behrens said, constantly works with mental health professionals to try and keep its programs, as she put it, best in class. Former players who have had mental health problems speak to rookies at the Rookie Transition Program that each first-year player attends before the start of training camp, as well as during Team Awareness meetings that take place during the season.

"And I think in this space, we're trying to think about, first of all, the learning has gotten better," Behrens said. "Everybody is much more aware. I think we've done a really good job with our guys about reducing that stigma, thanks to people who've been open about their stories, and open about the journey that they've been on. But we are looking at other ways that we can strengthen that program, in ways that both the league and the union feel really strongly about. And, again, not with a new policy, but what we're working on is an enhanced program in this space. I think that's something we've said publicly. I don't want to get into the details of it, but it's something we're looking at."

Behrens said finding common ground with the union on how to enhance the existing benefits available to players that would address mental health is a priority for the league.

"But again, the priority is twofold," she said. "The priority is, in the most general sense, helping players manage the stress that comes with life in the NBA, that comes with demands that they have. Some of them are external forces; some of them are internal. How do you help a rookie deal with not playing as much as he's used to playing? How do you help a rookie deal with life traveling as much as they do? How do you help young fathers be better dads? All of those things are in play.

"It's a sort of very general, support, resources, interaction, mentoring, all of those things ... very generally, the sort of mental wellness: how are you managing the stress to do the best on the court and in your job that you can be? That's a huge priority for us and the union and all of our teams. In terms of, again, the players that have real mental health issues, we want to continue to make sure we have a best in class program and the resources to help those guys."

But Behrens, while not specifically addressing White's situation with the Rockets, says that the league does not believe that outside mental health physicians should have decision-making authority about courses of treatment for players.

"They can certainly have a seat at the table, but at some point, somebody has to be the decision-maker, and it has to be, in this case, the employer has to have control over how that's going to function," she said. "Because you can't vet every doctor that everybody sees, and in some cases, you have different opinions among doctors. That happens often. If you have a knee injury, you should go get a second opinion. But at some point, the employer, it can't be decision by committee. Someone has to own the decision. At this point, we still think the team doctor is the right person to do that decision."

That dichotomy was at the heart of White's problems with Houston. But despite getting there two months early to begin workouts and living in Texas with his advisor, James Walker -- Walker married White's mother's cousin, and has known him since he was 7 -- White never got on the court for the Rockets. His relationship with the team and general manager Daryl Morey disintegrated as they tried to address how to work through his disorder in a way that would allow him to play.

Again: no one came to the discussions with ill intentions. But White came to believe the Rockets did not serve him well. According to him:

1. the Rockets said that White had to go to a psychiatrist every day, even though that is generally not recommended as a treatment protocol for anyone dealing with mental health issues, including those who suffered from severe mental health problems such as schizophrenia;

2. the team-recommended psychiatrist told White that he had informed the team that he didn't recommend White come to him every day, but that the team informed the psychiatrist that if White didn't see him every day, the team would fine White, and that the psychiatrist felt obligated to inform White of that fact;

3. the team and White, White says, agreed to a protocol that laid out a basic plan for treatment going forward. He says the protocol was signed by White's personal physician, Dr. Mary Wilkens, the psychiatrist working with White, Dr. Aaron Fink, and the Rockets' medical team physician, Dr. James Muntz. However, at a December, 2012 meeting of the parties, Morey said that the team was not aware when it drafted White that he suffered from anxiety disorder at the time he was drafted.

Yet in a subsequent conversation between White and Muntz, Muntz said the team did know that White had anxiety disorder, having received his medical records from Iowa State before the team drafted him.

4. the Rockets' outside counsel, Michael Goldberg, subsequently took over as the team's representative in discussions with White. In one of the discussions that took place in order to try and keep the matter from going to arbitration, Goldberg said that if White signed an agreement with the team that avoided arbitration, he would assist White in trying to develop a more comprehensive mental health policy going forward. White agreed and signed, but was subsequently traded to the 76ers in the summer of 2013.

Walker spent all summer in Texas with White. He was at every workout, to the point where the Rockets had him help with working out some of the players. He says after White suffered back spasms and missed a week just before camp, the relationship with the team started to change.

"His doctor in Minnesota, she talked to me, too," Walker said. "She said, 'what are they doing for his anxiety?' I said, 'they're not doing anything.' And she talked to Royce. She also talked to Royce, she said 'how do you feel?' Royce was like, I don't know. They didn't want to talk to her. They wanted to deal with their own doctor. They didn't want to talk to her and they really didn't deal with Royce ... they just kind of brushed him off and he shut down."

The Rockets did not wish to respond publicly to White's claims, saying only through a team attorney that they wished him the best going forward. They do maintain that while White may have believed a protocol agreement between the team and him was in place, they are not in possession of one, or of a draft of one. Sources say the team did agree to several of White's requests during the negotiations, including the use of a bus to get to games, and hiring a personal trainer and nutritionist. Ultimately, though, they could never find enough common ground for White to return to the court, after playing for the Rockets' summer league team.

The Rockets liked, and like, White personally, the sources said. And professionally, they invested a high Draft pick in him; selfishly, if for no other reason, they hoped it would work out. And, at least they gave it a shot. But that is the frustration. It didn't work out. White lost trust in Morey and the team, and felt he was made out to be a selfish person with unrealistic intentions through subsequent stories about his dealings with the team.

"How is it a special privilege to go from a private plane, with your teammates, with food and everything that you could ask for, drive right up to the plane and the gate and you don't have to go through any security, how is it special treatment for me to say, you know what, I'm going to go the long route?," he asked. "Ain't nothing special about it. I don't need to take the private jet; I don't need to take the team-owned plane with the catered service. I'll take the bus. Give me a $50 stipend so that I can stop at Applebee's on the way. That's what we were really talking about."

But White does not want his story to just be a rehash of what went wrong in Houston. He is too young a man to tell old men's tales. He needs to start his career, play basketball somewhere, see if he can make a go of it professionally in a world that is still trying to figure out how to best serve the needs of people like him.

Everyone would need to give a little. Can he? Could a team? Can the league?

"I think so much of it would depend on how his trust level was with his particular coach," Hoiberg said. "It wasn't that hard for me. I carved out some time. Some times it was five minutes; sometimes it's an hour. At this level, some teams have psychiatrists. Absolutely, I think he could do it, because I've seen it work with him. Is there a specific formula? I know it's a different level and you're playing two games a week as opposed to four or five. There's so much more travel ... it's so much different. When he played the 10-day with Sac two years ago, I don't think there was any issue with the travel. I think there's a misconception with 'can he get on the plane?' That's just not true. It's something that I saw work with the kid. We'll see how it plays out."

In the meantime, White says he and fellow millennials aren't going back into the shadows.

"I want to play at the top level," White said. "And I should be able to. If we go back and talk about who I got drafted with, we talk about who's shining now, like Draymond (Green), who I love. I love his game. Again, you can't put more irony in a story than mine. You talk about two players who are the hybrid, new looking four man. Who are you talking about? You're talking about Draymond Green. And when he was in college, there was only one other player who led his team in every statistic. And he led his in four; I actually led mine in five. That was me."
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AroundTheWorld · Jun 13, 2016

All I see is White pointing fingers at others. Can we just forget about this guy, finally.

hongxingli · Jun 13, 2016

did not finish reading, but as usual, he is probably saying the right thing most of the time, the issue with him is that I'm not sure if it's pure mental thing, he is trying the gauging the system, I feel that he did not put in effort from his end AT ALL.

J.R. said: ↑

Does NBA have right plan for mental health going forward?

Click to expand...

Haymitch · Jun 13, 2016

James White would have been our Shaun Livingston

Dr of Dunk · Jun 13, 2016

Haymitch said: ↑

James White would have been our Shaun Livingston
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I thought Shaun Livingston would've been our Shaun Livingston.

CCity Zero · Jun 13, 2016

Dr of Dunk said: ↑

I thought Shaun Livingston would've been our Shaun Livingston.
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Lol, perfect

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Royce White would have been our Draymond Green

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Royce White would have been our Draymond Green

Fantasma Negro Member

bulkatron Member

BleedRocketsRed Contributing Member

coachbadlee Member

napalm06 Huge Flopping Fan

CDrex Contributing Member

roslolian Member

Amiga 10 years ago... Supporting Member

Kruze10 Member

okierock Contributing Member

topfive CF OG

danoman Contributing Member

asianballa23 Member

ApuN Member

J.R. Member

AroundTheWorld 98er Supporting Member

hongxingli Contributing Member

Haymitch Custom Title Supporting Member

Dr of Dunk Clutch Crew

CCity Zero Member

Share This Page

Amiga 10 years ago...
Supporting Member

AroundTheWorld 98er
Supporting Member

Haymitch Custom Title
Supporting Member