Don’t worry about John Wall and Bradley Beal, Washington Wizards fans.
They’re perfectly fine, according to Mr. Wall.
From SI.com’s Andrew Sharp:
Then we hit the other controversies from this summer. We talked about his relationship with Bradley Beal. “Not everybody’s going to have a perfect relationship with every great player on their team,” he says. “But when I step between those lines and I’m with my team, we’re a brotherhood. We’re not great, and I wouldn’t be myself, without him. He’s able to knock down shots for me, I knock shots down for him, we make plays for each other. We’re fine, we’re perfectly fine. We both want to be great. We just gotta figure out how to balance it out. We both know, if we’re not both averaging 20-plus, our team’s not going very far.”
It’s unsettling to some, mostly fans, whenever they hear that the two star players on their favorite team aren’t best buddies. It’s infinitely harder to digest when said star players have spent almost their entire career together (Wall entered the league before Beal).
I often compare this to people finding out about their favorite band breaking up or discovering that said band isn’t the best of friends off stage. There is this expectation, this illusion, that when people spend so much time alongside one another in the spotlight, they have to be like family. They just have to be. It makes sense.
Thing is, they don’t have to be, and they often aren’t.
In the NBA specifically, championships aren’t founded solely on friendships. The Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant dynamic was nothing to tout off the court. It mattered what they did on the court. They had chemistry there, and that’s what was important.
It’s the same deal with Bradley Beal and John Wall. No, despite what they’ve said, it doesn’t seem like they’re particularly close. But they know it, and they’ve kind of admitted it, and yet they still understand how important one’s success is to the other’s.
For them, though, the problem is actually succeeding. The Wizards aren’t a surefire playoff team this year, and if they miss the spring dance yet again, fair or not, Beal’s and Wall’s relationship beyond the margins will be thrust under an even more magnified microscope.
