Former Toronto Raptors player says team staged ‘interventions’ for Lowry after DeRozan trade

Kyle Lowry was not a fan of the Toronto Raptors trading DeMar DeRozan for Kawhi Leonard back in 2018. 

In fact, he was so bothered by the trade that he basically isolated himself from the team for the first chunk of the 2018-19 season, according to former Raptors player Danny Green.

“Beginning of the year, [Lowry] wasn’t rocking with the organization. They traded DeMar, and he wasn’t f*cking with anybody,” Green said on a recent episode of the No Fouls Given podcast. “We started our training camp/preseason in Vancouver, and we started working our way through Canada, and we didn’t see [Lowry].

“He came on his own and left on his own, so he wasn’t on the bus with the team… We’d see him at practice, but he’d be there early, he’d be off in his own corner doing his own workouts. He’d practice with us too, but he just wasn’t rocking with the coaching staff or front office at the time.”

Green said it came to a point where then-head coach Nick Nurse approached him and other veteran players to resolve the situation. The eventual solution brought forth by Nurse was an intervention with his teammates. 

Green said a few members of the leadership group had to sit down with Lowry to try to turn things around.

“Me, Kawhi, I think we had Jonas Valančiūnas, us older guys, we had to sit down and talk to Kyle about him being more a part of the group,” Green said. “We had moments during the season where it was like intervention-type sh*t about him, talking about him while he was in the room. This is like, ‘yo, we gotta get Kyle to f*cking do that,’ while he was sitting right there. That type of sh*t.

“He was a great teammate. He’d f*ck with us, but coaching staff, front office, he let it be known, ‘I’m not rocking with y’all right now.'”

It’s a good thing that Lowry eventually came around, as he would wind up being a very important piece to the Raptors’ championship run that season.

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