Shaun Livingston’s challenging NBA career and enduring legacy

Three-time NBA Finals champion and all-around inspiration

Shaun Livingston ended his challenging NBA career as a three-time NBA Champion with the Warriors. It’s hard to imagine a more storybook ending to a career that started with such a disastrous injury followed by so many years of trying to find a permanent NBA home.

And Livingston didn’t just settle in at the end of Golden State’s bench. He made measurable contributions during Golden States playoff campaigns between 2015 and 2019. In 2016, scored 16 points in three separate starts against the Rockets in the first round. In the first game of the 2016 NBA Finals, he scored 20 points off the bench in Golden State’s 15-point washing of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

In reading up on Livingston’s story, something about how he handled his situation really jumped out at me. Livingston made a specific decision that he wasn’t going to allow the way the media was dealing with his injury distract him from what he needed to do to get back in the game. And that didn’t mean he was just attempting to ignore the media. He actually cut back on his consumption.

The Jump just had a discussion centered around the question: Are today’s NBA players too distracted? Which made me think of Jimmy Butler‘s frustrations at the end of his time with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns are averaging 19.5 and 22.3 points respectively in their careers. And yet, since the 2014- 15 season when Wiggins was drafted, Minnesota has only recorded one season above .500 and made only one playoff appearance.

And yes, I’m absolutely sure that there’s any number of reasons that the Timberwolves are struggling. But when I think about Jimmy Butler taking four guys from the very end of Minnesota’s bench and giving Towns and Wiggins that work in practice, even at the time, I couldn’t help but wonder if the focus wasn’t at least part of the issue.

The conclusion they seemed to come to on The Jump is that based on players like Steph Curry and James Harden who are advancing the game, the distractions aren’t too much. But the reality of the question is that unless a large portion of players across the board all cut back on the technology-based distractions that simply weren’t part of the game even as recently as 15 years ago, there’s no way to definitively say.

It’s like someone saying that drinking coffee after a certain time of the day doesn’t affect their ability to get a good nights sleep. It’s certainly possible that they’re absolutely correct. But unless they limit their coffee drinking to the morning or cut it out altogether there is really no way to know for sure.

To me, Livingston’s biggest legacy will be the hope his story has given and will continue to give athletes from across sports that even in the midst of the most disastrous injuries, there is always the possibility of a meaningful comeback and therefore a reason to hope.

I have to assume that in a situation where a person’s passion and livelihood are on the line, it would be incredibly easy to start down the slippery emotional slope toward despair and hopelessness. But for as long as there are sports injuries, Shaun Livingston will forever be a comeback story…maybe even the comeback story that athletes can point to and say…

“If he could do it, so can I.”