Within an hour of Eric Bledsoe tweeting out "I Don't wanna be here," on Sunday (October 22), the Phoenix Suns initiated an organizational facelift. Gone were assistant coaches Nate Bjorkgren, Jason Fraser and Mehmet Okur, along with head coach Earl Watson, who is said to have had a struggling relationship with his superiors for the better part of his six months at the helm of the team. In the midst of the chaos, all parties denied initial reports related to why the chain of events went down as they did, with Bledsoe reportedly telling general manager Ryan McDonough the tweet had nothing to do with basketball; McDonough not believing him; and McDonough then turning around to reject speculation that Watson's firing boiled down to the team's dreadful start to the season.
“There was a lack of alignment organizationally. We didn’t make the change strictly based on the past three games. It was an evaluation of a year and half,” McDonough told the press. McDonough went on to recall "a number of meetings" the organization had with Watson about shifting focus to player development, before adding, “We didn’t see those changes. You guys saw the first three games. There was a lack of development and a lack of individual player improvement and growth.”
Fraser and Okur were Watson's player development coaches. Okur, for one, didn't take well to being called out by McDonough, and he made that clear in a profanity-laced message posted to Instagram. "Family first. Other little s**t and MFS comes and goes in my life. F**k em. I am out," Okur wrote.
Watson leaves the Suns having put up a 33-85 record after taking over the interim coaching role from Jeff Hornacek last year, before being elevated to the head coaching position for the start of the present season. But despite having just been officially passed the torch, he led the team to a historically bad start of 2017-18, as the Suns have lost their first three games by a combined 92 points. McDonough and the Suns now hand the reigns over to associate head coach Jay Triano.
As per Bledsoe's future with the team, it is believed to be murky at this point. The eighth-year point guard insisted to McDonough that he was at a hair salon with his wife, and getting impatient when he sent the tweet out. But McDonough admits that he didn't have reason to believe him. Soon after followers received Bledsoe's tweet, former teammate DeAndre Jordan released a cryptic tweet of his own that read, "Come back home bro."
Source: Twitter
