Fred VanVleet: “If you told me in September that I …

Fred VanVleet: “If you told me in September that I would miss the whole season, Stephen would miss 75% of the season, and we would win 52 games and play the Lakers in a four-five matchup, take them to six without KD, I would probably say, ‘Okay, that doesn’t sound crazy to me.’ And it’s not a failure. I wouldn’t feel bad about that. Now, while you’re in it, it’s crazy, right? It looks bad some nights. You’ve got the blown leads, you’ve got the mishaps, you’ve got guys’ performances up and down. So, if you’re riding that roller coaster of emotion, then yeah, you’re going to feel some type of way. I know fans struggle with that sometimes because they’re just so passionate. They want everything to be perfect all the time. But all in all, especially now as I get older in the league, you have to be able to take away the positives: KD playing 78 games, Amen taking the growth that he did as a full-time point guard, Reed making a big jump in his development. We saw a lot of flashes. Alpie was up and down, but the way he started and the way he finished, you kind of saw it. And he’s still pretty damn young. Jabari, you know how I feel about Jabari, to see his progression. To see Tari’s progression in a real role, being a starter sometimes and playing real minutes. I think there are just a ton of positives that you can take away. We went through a lot. We tried a lot. We went through adversity. We had to come out of adversity. We had to battle through injury. We saw what worked and what didn’t work.”

YouTube

This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Fred VanVleet: “If you told me in September that I …