CW: Really disagree. Being an alpha is not just going around, fouling, being physical, and throwing elbows. You’re not sitting around the team. Being alpha is talking to your team, you guys need a bucket, other teams on a 10-0 run. Being able to handle the ball, run sets, play position-less basketball, be an extension of your coach on the court. Like all those things get mixed into it and a lot of people get caught up in the fact that I’m so stoic when I play and I don’t really get too high or too low. They take that as not being assertive or not being alpha. It’s really like I’m so locked into the game that you don’t ever see me yell or scream because I’m thinking about the next play, thinking about opportunities that I can score, opportunities we can get a bucket, how we can improve on defense and get a stop, and I’m letting my teammates know that.
So you can ask anyone on the team, you can ask my coaching staff, the people who are with me every day watching me get better. Most definitely, I guess they will call me “alpha”, but I see it as just being a leader.
JW: Yeah, I think to answer that, you look at a lot of players in the NBA, if you take Kawhi [Leonard], for example, you don’t ever see Kawhi yell or do anything, but we never really question if he’s alpha or not. I think for me that was some of my end as well. I think just coming from Santa Clara, people don’t really know, and here we are. A lot of teams that passed up know now, so I mean a lot of people don’t like making the same mistakes twice.
