Ok, maybe he has one regret.
“I guess a little of me wishes we could redo that whole thing, with (Anthony Davis) and the team we had (in New Orleans). Tyreke Evans and Eric Gordon and Jrue Holiday and myself and the coach that Monty (Williams) is now as a whole, Ryan Anderson in his prime, Al-Farouq Aminu.”
Rivers' early NBA days in the Bayou are a topic of conversation 90 minutes before the Rockets 115-109 win over the Phoenix Suns Saturday night because Williams, his first NBA head coach, is now the head coach of the Suns.
“We had a really talented team that didn’t do anything, we’re all to blame for that, but that’s all I would take back.”
Much like his team, Rivers struggled in New Orleans. After taking Davis with the top pick of the 2012 draft, the then-Hornets selected Rivers with the tenth selection. In two and a half seasons, the guard out of Duke shot 39 percent from the field in 165 games. He started 33 contests, averaging just 21.4 minutes.
“I just know he dealt with a lot when he came to the NBA,” Williams recalled. “I was there. People would scream at him at home and on the road and that was a lot to deal with.”
On January 12, 2015, New Orleans dealt Rivers to Boston as part of a 3-team trade that netted it Quincy Pondexter and a second round pick. He was moved to the Los Angeles Clippers three days later, where his father, Doc, was the head coach and general manager.
“Just wasn’t playing good basketball,” Rivers says of his time in New Orleans. “And then it got even worse. I got traded to my dad’s team. How hard is that to play for my dad? The pressure and scrutiny of that was terrible.”
It was a low-point for a 22-year old who was built up as a future star in middle school and a prized recruit out of high school, but as it turns out, his lowest moment in basketball set the stage for his reclamation.
“That’s when I really gave myself a choice and said I’m either going to feed into this and be out the league in a year or two or stop caring what people think and just go get my best and be able to sleep at night if I do that and then game by game it got better and obviously this is like five years later I’m here now and that’s how. I stopped caring about what people think and I still don’t to this day.”
Rivers has turned himself into an indispensable cog of a Rockets team that has championship aspirations, and for Williams, who started coaching Rivers as a 19-year old, it’s been fun to see him survive the negatives that come with being in the spotlight at an early age.
“He’s had a lot of hype since he was in eighth and ninth grade. A lot of guys can’t do that, and he’s been able to carry that load. It’s a lot to be Doc Rivers kid and come to the NBA, so it’s cool to see him evolve as a player.”
Now at the age of 27, in the middle of his eighth NBA season, following three trades and a contract buyout, the Rockets guard now understands why the beginning of his career started as bumpy as it did.
“I was so caught up into the pressure which I had always handled so well before,” He admits. “I was the number one high school player in America. My dad, is my father, who just won a championship with Boston. It was everything you could think of as a kid, and it didn’t phase me at all.
“I went to college, it was very, very easy to be completely honest in terms of competition. I went to Duke. You just name it and then I went to the NBA and boom, things start not to go right, which was new for me in my life and the pressure I think of everything I thought I was gonna lose really started to eat me up there in New Orleans where I stopped trusting myself and I became a whole different player out there in a bad way.”
Rivers believes learning how to deal with failure is the biggest hurdle for young players. Just about every one of the 500 or so players currently in the NBA almost always found himself as the best player on the floor before arriving in the league and as he sits in front of his locker with undrafted rookie Chris Clemmons to his left and undrafted second-year man Gary Clark to his right, Rivers repeats the advice he gives two guys who are just trying to make it.
“The stuff that you’re going through now is gonna shape who you are in a year or two. No one’s gonna remember this. No one cares what I did in New Orleans. It’s a what have you done for me lately league, it’s a what have you done for me lately world.
“I always tell them there a lot of guys who are going through a similar situation as you and they’ll be out the league in two years and won’t ever get back because they handled it the wrong way. If you handle it the right way, these can be blessings in disguise. The stuff that happened in New Orleans with me, I wouldn’t take any of them back. I wouldn’t want to redo my career at all. I really wouldn’t. It helped me become who I am today.”
Austin Rivers doesn’t care what you say, he doesn’t care what you think. Sure, he knows his NBA career didn’t flourish off the bat, but he has no regrets. It’s those struggles that have allowed him to thrive today.