It’s hard to believe thatRicky Rubio Only 31. Some of us remember him juggling at Juventud in Daluna 14 years ago, or winning the Euroleague in 2010 with Barcelona alongside mythological names like Juan Carlos Navarro and Erzam Lorbeck. If Rubio had broken in even ten years earlier, we might have seen him become a Euroleague legend. Instead, he went to the NBA Draft with the confidence that his game management capabilities could upgrade any offense. He was eventually selected in 5th place by Minnesota and was one of two coordinators the team took in a row and immediately ahead of one, Stephen Kerry.
Jump into the present. Rubio started the season great in Cleveland until he was injured, tore the leash and traded to Indiana. He recently announced he would retire from the NBA when his child starts first grade. Rubio’s son is only two years old, but Ricky set goals: “When he starts studying the NBA will not be worth it. I will return to Spain. I do not want to move him from city to city when he is six, at the age when he will have friends. I talked about it with “My wife. There will come a time when basketball will not be the first priority in my life.”
This is a fascinating sentence. He teaches us a lot about his human guns, about his career, and in general about the place of “Wonder Children” in the world of sports. Rubio was one such. At the age of 16 he was the king of kidnappings of the Euroleague, at the age of 14 he played in the Spanish league. There were prodigies who collapsed under the image (Dragon Bender, Shabaz Muhammad) and those who managed to fulfill any label they had (LeBron James), but Rubio somewhere in the middle.
He’s not a flop. He has a long career in the NBA, very beautiful moments, not bad statistical lines and even two years as a top five player in a playoff team in Utah. On the other hand, Rubio was not exactly a star. There are not many significant moments to remember his name, and in his best years he was the second player of his kind in Minnesota not to reach the playoffs with Kevin Love.
He did not play in the most glittering cities (Minnesota, Utah, Phoenix and Cleveland) and did not get beyond the first round. He never scored over 13 points in a game and was nowhere near the All-Star. He was indeed a beloved player and had a very positive impact on the teams he played for, especially in Phoenix which progressed very much with him one year before Chris Paul arrived, but he was never an All-Star or close to it. Assuming Rubio is not coming back better than ever after tearing the crossbar, his career is not exactly a success. Not to be missed either.
There are quite a few reasons for this. Also the fact that he played in small markets and failing teams, and did not get a chance to really be part of a good team and especially the lack of stable shooting and injuries. In the NBA coordinators should be athletic and pose a threat off the arc, Rubio was not. In a league where you play at such a high pace and players are required to do everything, these minuses are especially painful.
This year it seemed that most of him was on his way to closing an exciting circle. His Cleveland was a positive surprise at the start of the season, as his and Kevin Love’s minutes, his partner from the happy years in Minnesota, were great. It looks like that forgotten team of the beginning of the previous decade has rolled onto the bench of the current decade and on its way to the playoffs. Then he tore the strip in one of the saddest moments of the 2021/22 season so far. Rubio is not scheduled to return this year. In addition to his statement that in another 3-4 years he plans to leave the league, his future is unclear.
In the Spanish national team, however, we saw another Ricky Rubio. He was the outstanding player of the 2019 World Cup, was selected to the top five of the Olympics and met expectations from him even when he finished a game at the European Championship for reserve teams with 51 points, 24 rebounds, 12 assists and seven steals. The confidence and fire he has in the “La Rucha” uniform has not been restored in the synthetic NBA anymore, and maybe if he does return to Barcelona, he will ignite it once more. It’s not just a smaller pitch or less athletic opponents, Rubio is seen in a completely different place mentally when he plays with the team. Stability and passion, to which he hinted when he said he did not want to move his son from city to city, are different when you represent a team or team and not a franchise.
Although Rubio managed to deal with pressure throughout his career, he did not have a normal childhood. At 14 and 11 months old he was on the pitch in the Spanish league, after years of training, tournaments and what not. At an age when kids go to school or spend hours in front of the TV, he worked on foot movements and getting in color on the field.
At 17, the age when people fall in love for the first time, he played in an Olympic final against Jason Kidd, Kobe Bryant, Devin Wade and LeBron James. Years before, entire halls had called his name. This is no ordinary childhood, but Rubio was not a boy who was aggressively pushed by his family. She was always there by his side and supported him, he even addressed this in a long text he wrote for the Flair’s Tribune website.
His parents were always there with him, he said, in each of the injuries he suffered throughout his career while he was on the field at the time his mother was battling cancer. “I hated being so far away from my mom during the fight,” he said, “I was in a hotel, in a city, after a game, and I thought about having to be with her. I was angry after she died, I blamed everything. I fell into depression. You look at basketball. “Completely different afterwards. About life completely different. Nothing felt serious on that level. I felt like I was grinding water, but there was no choice.”
Rubio noted that he managed to cope with the heavy loss, and no doubt he wanted (and wants) a career as a professional basketball player, but he did not have a normal childhood. Not every parent wants their child to become such a star, with all the stress that comes with it and the life that is completely different from “routine” adolescence, complicated in its own right.
This context makes Rubio’s quotes particularly interesting. If he can reasonably recover from the injury, he’s good enough to continue playing in the NBA, but not sure he wants to. “There will come a point where basketball will not be the first priority in my life. I want my child to go to school and have a normal childhood.” In doing so, perhaps, Ricky Rubio closes a circle with the boy he himself once was.
