Then there was this: You remember the post-season postmortem when Larry Bird all but begged Roy Hibbert to opt out of the final year of his contract? West was watching. West was listening. And West was seething. He thought it was a low-class move by the organization to, in his words, "throw Roy under the bus."
"That's one thing where I wish they would have handled better was the situation with Roy," West said. "I'll be honest with you, that bothered me a little bit, and I told Roy that. I'm the type of guy who feels like we're all in this fight together and I'm not designed in that way to put it all on one guy. That did rub me the wrong way. That threw me off. I started reading some of that stuff, I started thinking, 'Whoaa.' I just didn't feel good about that. I told Roy that it bothered me, that he's still my teammate.
...
West also cleared up the apparent confusion over when he opted out. On draft night, Bird insisted that he hadn't yet heard from either Hibbert or West or their representatives, even going so far as to say he expected both to opt in. When some of us in the media persisted asking about West, Bird, who enjoys tweaking us just for fun, said, "Anybody else got any stupid questions??" then pointed to the Indianapolis Star's Candace Buckner, who last week broke the news that West was opting out. "C'mon, Candace, I know you've got some (dumb questions) in you."
Well.
Here's West on that subject:
"We wanted to be respectful so I had my agent tell the organization two, three days before the draft that we were going to opt out of the final year of the contract," West said. "I felt doing it post-draft wouldn't be the right thing to do."
So, um, somebody fudged the truth, and I'm not betting that it's West.