It's part of his job to play in summer league and come to play in shape. Again it shows very poorly on him. Obviously if he produces when it counts who cares, but at present this is all we have to go on. Any else is 100% speculation.
The regular season is 1000x more important than SL and thus he should be using his offseason to prep specifically for the next regular season. Stopping his bulking phase early in order to get into game shape for SL IMO is a waste of time. Sure it makes him look bad to some of the fans that were expecting big things from him, but that is a small price to pay if it actually helps him when the real games come around. You are right that his showing in SL is all we have to go off of, but we also shouldn't be taking away too much from what happened in 5 games of disorganized SL basketball when he wasn't fully in shape either.
Cmon man. "Bulking phase?!?" You say that like it's a professional step that the team and trainers prescribed for him. No team or trainer ever told a professional athlete to get out of shape as "training" or "preparation" for a season. You're just making excuses for lack of professionalism. If you can show me a quote where one of chriss' personal or team trainers said, "get fatter" I'll concede. But until then the team put him in summer league. You can vote about how unimportant summer league is, but some players aren't required to participate. Those that are, are required for a reason, they need to work in something. Showing up out of shape shows a lack of commitment, a lack of dedication, unprofessionalism, and frankly a lack of support to your teammates. To label it anything OTHER than lame is just flat out patently ridiculous. Summer league may not be beautiful basketball, and winning may not matter, but it's meant to help a staff development players' skills, teamwork, and to evaluate where the players are in terms of development. The Chriss summer league experiment this summer was an utter failure.
There is being in shape and their is being in game shape. Most of these guys get out of game shape in the off season. To me that is what we saw from Chriss. He was focused on getting bigger and got out of game shape. He was still in much better shape and conditioning than a normal person, but wasn't in the game shape that an NBA player is typically in when they play in games. He was clearly focused on hitting the weights and not putting as much time into cardio, thus why I called it "bulking phase". Doesn't mean that he completely ignored the cardio part, but just wasn't nearly as focused on it.
Still making excuses. Job = summer league. Showed up out of shape for summer league making it somewhat useless. If any of my team members mailed in even a less important aspect of their job I'd let them know that's unacceptable and now there's a microscope on them.
This isn't football, which might be exactly the issue. Chriss' background is football where it is advantageous to be strong and heavy. I bet he went off the reservation in his off season "bulking" which really hurts him as a player. I bet the training staff is ticked. It still makes me wonder what goes through players heads when they sacrifice what makes them good to try to be something that is a disadvantage.
You are WAAAAAY over estimating what Summer League is.
Come on. The training staff isn't "ticked". Even if they went along with it--Summer League showed that maybe they shouldn't have gone the route they took. Or maybe they need to readjust his offseason regimen. Because guess what? The SUMMER LEAGUE IS THE OFFSEASON. It includes improving your game AND your body. Chriss either needs to change the process of "bulking up", or work more on the skills part to compensate for the bulking up.
I admit. I am speculating.
