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There was probably some legit personal reasons at play, but those most of the time are just for a few days/weeks, you typically don't see a player take a whole year off for that, especially if it's a contract year.
There was probably a combination of factors, though golden's version is likely the closest to what actually happened. He started the first game of the season, he was ready to go. Nurse then started playing two young and green guys ahead of him. Part of it was due to style (in case of banton), part of it was prioritizing development, part of it was maybe locker room dynamics. The the DNP's started to pile up on the guy's contract year, so they mutually decided to part ways, and see if they could find a win-win at the deadline.
I don't blame Nurse for the dnp's, that's the coach's prerogative: he wanted to play lenghty and fast, develop guys they saw as part of the future, banton was red-hot to start the season so he made the call to go with him. The irony though, as pointed out, is that later in the season we saw banton/flynn naturally fall out of the rotation, and the team found itself lacking steady guard presence from the bench to keep the team in games and tone down the starter minutes (which is what Dragic could theoretically bring)
It's easy in hindsight to point it out as a fumble, but if banton kept balling like he was earlier on and/or we had gotten someone like poetl or turner at deadline with dragic as ballast, no one would be talking about this. Didn't break that way, now it's behind everyone and they should look ahead.
There was probably a combination of factors, though golden's version is likely the closest to what actually happened. He started the first game of the season, he was ready to go. Nurse then started playing two young and green guys ahead of him. Part of it was due to style (in case of banton), part of it was prioritizing development, part of it was maybe locker room dynamics. The the DNP's started to pile up on the guy's contract year, so they mutually decided to part ways, and see if they could find a win-win at the deadline.
I don't blame Nurse for the dnp's, that's the coach's prerogative: he wanted to play lenghty and fast, develop guys they saw as part of the future, banton was red-hot to start the season so he made the call to go with him. The irony though, as pointed out, is that later in the season we saw banton/flynn naturally fall out of the rotation, and the team found itself lacking steady guard presence from the bench to keep the team in games and tone down the starter minutes (which is what Dragic could theoretically bring)
It's easy in hindsight to point it out as a fumble, but if banton kept balling like he was earlier on and/or we had gotten someone like poetl or turner at deadline with dragic as ballast, no one would be talking about this. Didn't break that way, now it's behind everyone and they should look ahead.
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