Rudy Gobert:
First of all, he’s French, so we started off on the wrong foot to begin with, but nonetheless, we invested the #4 overall pick, and the most premium asset acquired in the Carmelo Anthony blockbuster deal, on the Colossus of Croissant. The main thing that upsets a fan base, and in particular me, as a GM, is laziness. A lack of initiative. No inner drive and determination to improve. Rudy Gobert was all of those things, while also, again, being aggressively French. He was a complete and utter bust, with his potential tanking in both his teenage years. He should’ve been a franchise building block, and instead was optioned by the team halfway through his rookie deal. He’s since gone on to make moderate strides of improvement and found a way to latch on to a few horrendous rosters and even finagled his way into a multi-year deal before being dealt to Washington, so that also pisses the Orlando contingency off even more because he’s made himself at least semi-rosterable now and he’s doing it for a rival within the division.
Grant Hill:
One of the first moves of the new league, and certainly the first big blockbuster deal, was bringing Grant Hill to Orlando to create a feared trio between Shaq, Penny and Grant, sending out 7 years worth of picks and pick swaps to Detroit. He was LeBron before LeBron. Just a total fraud. He literally cost us a championship getting absolutely flamed by his college teammate Christian Laettner, which also allowed Hank a diabetic leg to stand on when he gets chirpy in the chat (arguably the worst part about all of this). He was a fake defender, he turned the ball over, he refused to work on his shooting downfalls, and he was selfish. Guy never knew what it meant to be a real winner, he was a diva, and we resent him to this day. We see a lot of LeBron in him, and that’s why it’s hard to respect either of them. The only saving grace with Grant is our scouting department saw something special in a drastically under utilized Eddie Jones out in LA and we got Catdude to eat the garbage and pulled off a franchise altering move to bring in Eddie, who eventually did become that 3rd piece we needed to secure a championship.
