Joe Thomas says he cried after playing a perfect game in a 30 point loss to Tom Brady and realized he had spent 10 years fooling himself into believing the Browns were a Super Bowl team before each season “The way I entered every season was like, if I need to get the most out of myself, I’ve got to convince myself this is a Super Bowl roster. That’s the mentality I have to have when I’m training, when I’m practicing, when I’m going through film study. And so you trick yourself every year, but after a while, you’re not that dumb anymore” “Going into year 10, we had traded away the first overall pick. We were trading guys away, saving capital for the future. The writing was on the wall that we were in a pretty significant rebuild. I kind of knew at that time, even though I was still trying to trick myself, in the back of your head you know you’re not going to be any good” “Then, about midway through that 10th season, we were playing the Patriots. Tom Brady comes to town, and I fucking hated Tom Brady, as everybody did in the league. I hated the Patriots. I just wanted to smash him so bad. We lost like 30 to 0. And I remember sitting in the car after the game, and I was just crying. I had ice on both elbows and knees. I was in pain, my wife was driving and I was just looking out the window. It was that moment when I realized I’d been kind of fooling myself for a while, and we were not going to win no matter what I did” “She finally said, ‘Are you okay? Did you have a bad game?’ Then the tears really came because I said, ‘I played a perfect game, and we lost by 30.’ It really sunk in at that moment that you don’t control the situation anymore. That feeling of loss of control is really hard. No matter what situation you’re in in life, it just feels like everything I’m working for, I have no control over the outcome. That’s a bad feeling” “I ended up meeting with the team psychologist and talking to somebody about it because it had been almost 10 years built up to that moment when you come to the realization that I’m kind of fooling myself. We’re not that team and we really don’t have a chance. And I don’t impact this game the way I’d hoped”

Draymond Green says Jordan 1s are one of the worst basketball shoes ever created while arguing Big Baller Brand never got a fair chance to improve its shoes “The first pair of shoes that any sneaker brand has ever made was not the greatest pair of shoes. It’s called trial and error. It’s called learning from mistakes. Again, it goes back to the noise that is around sports today and how things are spoken about” “I think ultimately that had a negative effect and a negative impact on what y’all were doing because the snowball starts rolling down the mountain, and you never really truly get the chance to make two better than one, make three better than two, make four better than three. You never really get the full opportunity because of the noise around it” “Think about this. You’ve probably worn a pair of Jordan 1s, just like I’ve worn a pair of Jordan 1s. One of the worst basketball shoes ever created. I love wearing Jordan 1s. It’s one of the best shoes to put on with a fit. But as far as a basketball shoe, you never see anyone playing in Jordan 1s anymore unless they’re trying to make a fashion statement” “Guess what that was, it’s the first one. Trial and error is something we all go through, and I honestly don’t think y’all ever got the full opportunity to actually work through the errors. But needless to say, I can always respect someone for swinging for the fences”

Trae Young says he knew it was time to leave Atlanta and wanted to do it the right way after seeing how OKC treated Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook “I knew it was time, and for me, I wanted to leave the right way. I never wanted to make it a big deal. I grew up in OKC, where I seen KD get killed for leaving and going a certain way, and I didn’t want that type of feeling. I also saw how they treated Russ whenever he ended up leaving OKC” “You never know how the NBA works. You never know if a rekindling is in the future for me down there. I love the owner, Tony, and all the ownership group and everybody down there. I have much love to a lot of people in Atlanta. So I never wanted to leave in a bad way” “But once we got in that third GM and brought in Onsi, you don’t necessarily feel as comfortable as you did before he got there. It wasn’t no big deal to me neither… There are so many things I won’t say until later on. Sometimes it’s better just to let things go”

Trae Young says he’s mastered the art of drawing fouls in the NBA, using it to his advantage while making opponents mad “I understand the rules. I mean, that’s the reason why I do it. If you were on my team, you would appreciate it. My teammates love being in the bonus and getting fouled” “As mad as you want to be at me, you can’t be aggressive with me. You can be physical. The NBA is physical. But when you start being overly physical, I use that to my advantage” “At the same time, it puts you in foul trouble and gets us closer to the bonus. So, yeah, it definitely makes people mad”

Carmelo Anthony says he still doesn’t know why the NBA pushed him out of the league for 15 months and was told his “aura” may have been too much “Imagine going through that as a player. Now you start questioning, like, ‘Damn. Was my career worth it? Did I really do what I was supposed to do in my career? Am I supposed to be here? Am I really nice? How are people looking at me?’” “I was down, down, down, down. I was back on the ground, hands up. Y’all got me. It’s a stickup. Take everything because of how it went down. Imagine me sitting there for 15 months like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Nobody got an answer for me. Everybody on TV making excuses. It’s this or it’s that. He didn’t want to come off the bench’” “I’mma be honest with you. As I studied it and did some knowledge on it, trying to get an understanding on it, I still can’t come up with nothing. It’s like, what was it? Some people came up to me like, ‘Melo, I’m going to be honest with you. Your aura was too much for out here. This couldn’t exist. Your aura couldn’t exist in here. Nobody was going to tell you that’” “I said, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ They said, ‘Everybody’s afraid to talk to you. Everybody’s afraid to say something to you.’ I said, ‘Why? I haven’t said nothing to nobody. I speak to everybody. I’m cordial. Why is everybody scared of me?’ Somebody said, ‘Well, you don’t need anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘Melo, you a superstar. You haven’t asked for one thing since you’ve been here’” “My point is, everybody had a thousand and one reasons of why it happened, and I still don’t know the reason why it happened. I have some inkling of why it happened or how it went down. I’m trying not to believe that’s what happened or how it went down, so I don’t want to speak on that”

I'm glad @TheChiefNerd won his appeal because finding, editing and framing clips that drive daily headlines in today’s information ecosystem is original work. Since April, I’ve reached over 600 million impressions using that same process. Unfortunately, my appeal was denied. @XCreators @allegrajacchia I hope this same recognition can be applied consistently. I’m asking for the same consideration for my account.

Al Jefferson says he is the last Celtic to average double digit rebounds after posting 16 points and 11 rebounds per game during the 2006–07 season, which led to him being traded for Kevin Garnett and signing a 5-year $65,000,000 contract “I averaged 16 [points] and 11 [rebounds]. If I’m not mistaken, I’m the last cat that averaged double figure rebounds for Boston. I remember Paul Pierce, Doc [Rivers] took me out at the end of a game. He’s like, ‘Nah, he need to get one more rebound for him to get to the average.’ I remember he kept me out there just to get that, and I wound up finishing the season averaging 16 and 11. Unfortunately, it got me traded, but it got me that bankroll” “I was hurt at first. I know it wasn’t personal. Look, I would trade Al Jefferson for Kevin Garnett any day of the week. I wasn’t hating on that. It was just, this like home to me. Y’all like my family, my brothers. I ain’t going to know how it’s going to feel to go in the locker room and I see TA and Delonte and Perk. I didn’t know how that felt”

Colin Kaepernick says his NFL settlement was meant to recover lost wages after being blackballed cost him over $150,000,000 while allowing him to keep pursuing his career without undermining the protest “For me, with the NFL blackballing me, my course of action is to file a grievance, which is essentially litigation against the NFL under that agreement. You go through an arbitration process as part of that, these are things that I had to learn along the way, everything is confidential as part of that process from the time you enter it” “I thought we would be able to expose all the documentation, all that. That was not the case. But your course of action to be able to be restored is filing a grievance. Ultimately, as part of that process, we reached a settlement. The settlement is trying to recover wages, and that’s really your course of action because of how the collective bargaining agreement was negotiated” “As part of that settlement, I can still pursue my career. I can still speak openly or freely and say what I want about the NFL. So there’s no signing my rights away in that regard. At that point, the NFL’s actions were irregular, that they were colluding against me. Them denying me a contract, we quantified and try to recover as part of that” “Now what that equates to is losing approximately $150 plus million. But that trying to be positioned in the same light as cutting a deal directly with the NFL to undermine the protest is where that becomes a nefarious positioning to try to justify the action”

Shane Battier says returning to Duke for his senior year cost him about $10,000,000 but winning a national championship and becoming more prepared for the NBA made it worth it “I had a good junior year. I was All-American, averaged about 19 [points] and probably could have came out then. Honestly, it was more important to me to be an impact player when I got to the league, and I felt like I wasn’t there yet. I was a power forward in college. I shot threes, but I was a stretch four essentially” “I knew if I went to the league, okay, I’m in the league. It probably cost me about $10 million for that one extra year I could have squeaked out. But at the time, it matters to me that I want to start. I want to be a good pro for a long time.’ So that last year of work was really important” “The leap of faith going through that process, I knew for where I wanted to be, I had to do it. But what I learned, my readiness… it was great that we won, absolutely. But you realize it really is about the journey and taking advantage of the opportunity. I was super proud of that decision”