“The person that ruined all of this was Bron,” Iman asserted.

“It’s like if Mike would have made it okay for y’all to just be like, ‘Yeah, I’m leaving this team, and I’m going to another ’cause I like what the owners are saying’—if Mike would have did that, there would have been no loyalty. ‘Cause we all, quote-unquote, wanted to be like Mike, right?” Shumpert explained. “I feel like when Bron made it okay for people to team up, it stopped making the star player have to come back with something added to their game.”

Superstars used to spend substantial time diversifying their games

“Everybody would come in the league and have they thing that they do that you can’t stop. This, but now we got the scouting report on you because you made it to the playoffs. So this year, we gonna take away this, and we wait on you to come back and have this,” Shump illustrated. “So you had Bron go up to Detroit and go through all that, right? And the man went to Miami. Went to Miami instead of coming back and defending it there. So it was like, now everybody thinking it’s cool—y’all could team up.”