Roth Says Adams "Most Volatile"

Scott Roth has labelled former player Josh Adams Tasmania’s “most volatile” player, as the fallout from the star guard's controversial exit from the club continues.

“There wasn’t any issues with Josh,” Roth added. 

“I think, really, at the end of the day of all the players there, he was the most volatile one.

“In our exit meeting we asked Josh Adams, our coaches and everyone there, ‘would you come back for the same salary? That's all we have. We've maxed you out. You're in the top five or six players in the league’,” Roth revealed on The Waterboys podcast.

“He (Adams) said ‘no’, emphatically to us. That was fine.

“Josh Magette came in afterwards and said, ‘let me talk to my wife’. And by the time the banquet was over with, Josh Magette had committed to us. 

“No one knew that. But he was coming back for the same salary, same everything, because that's all we had to offer those two guys (Magette and Adams) … we had maxed their salaries.

“We said ‘when you (Adams and Magette) land in the United States, the contracts will be sitting there. Magette signed immediately when he got home. Josh Adams … it took eight to 10 days for the representatives to come back and say ‘he's not accepting this deal’.

“At that point, we pivoted and started looking at players and we signed Rashard Kelly.

“We got down to the point where we, in about three weeks, we had Milton Doyle, done and signed. At that point, the representatives (for Adams) came back and said ‘he’ll take that offer’.

“It was too late by then. We’re not going to verbally de-commit to the guy (Doyle) that we've been going through.”

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The <a href="https://twitter.com/JackJumpers?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JackJumpers</a> have confirmed that Josh Adams won&#39;t return to the Club for <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NBL23?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NBL23</a>, wishing him well in the next phase of his career.<br><br>More: <a href="https://t.co/2GzzXTdOBx">https://t.co/2GzzXTdOBx</a> <a href="https://t.co/q0urX6MGnq">pic.twitter.com/q0urX6MGnq</a></p>&mdash; The NBL (@NBL) <a href="https://twitter.com/NBL/status/1537589329241214976?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 17, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Roth refuted Adams' claim, “he (Roth) didn’t want me”.

“If we never wanted him (Adams), he would never have got a contract, and it would never have sat in his lap for three weeks. At many, many points. He just could have said ‘yes’.

“I think people thought there's some kind of nefarious kind of action going on there or whatever. But it was very cut and dry that ‘you’re top six or seven players in the league, this is all we have. You can say ‘yes’, at any point, just like Josh Magette. Or you can say ‘no’, at any point, we get it and we're moving on’. That's exactly what we did.”

Adams was one of the stars of last season, helping get the JackJumpers to the Grand Final in a memorable first year.

He averaged 17 points a game, won the club’s inaugural MVP and made the NBL’s All-NBL Second Team.

Roth said he and Adams didn’t have a personality clash, despite both wearing their hearts on their sleeves. 

“I tried to let him be himself as much as I could … you know, with all of our guys, especially him, and I tried to maybe stay away from him a little bit more, because I know the volatility of you know, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time," Roth explained.

“For me, it was more of keeping my distance, especially during games, if I would get mad, I'd rather just take them out, let them cool down for a bit. But, you know, I feel like I treated all the players the same across the board. I don’t really feel that (there were issues) from that end of it.

“Why would I want to go back and offer him a contract, if I felt those things?”