I completely concede that it’s hindsight. You’re absolutely right.
But part of the point i’m trying to make here is that, so often, “question marks related to…character and motivation” are often based on fairly nebulous and ill-defined criteria. The things that are touted as character flaws and lack of motivation often turn out to be minor problems of adjustment, or completely non-existent.
Look at a baseball player like Manny Ramirez. I can’t count how many people used to complain that he was lazy and unmotivated, but the people who actually knew him and played with him every day said that he was a committed professional who spent hours in the batting cages. And when character complaints come from people outside the team, especially from reporters and other members of the media, those complaints are sometimes little more than another way of saying, “This guy doesn’t give all of the exclusive access and quotable soundbites that i would like, so he gets labelled a malcontent.”
I’m not arguing that character issues are irrelevant, or that they are all imaginary. I just think that such issues, especially when they focus on nebulous stuff like motivation, are often overblown by people who want to seem like they know more than they actually do about what goes on inside professional sports teams. And when the information comes from inside the team, sometimes it looks more like a smear campaign designed to deflate a player’s value when free agency rolls around. See Bryant, Dez.