When word came out Friday that the Seahawks had traded receiver Percy Harvin, the initial reaction for most was shock, then not long after, the natural question became, “What did he do?” Contending teams don’t just give up on their most talented players for little in return unless there’s something broken in the relationship between player and team. And sure enough, reports started coming out not long after the Trade that Harvin had been in physical altercations with teammates Golden Tate and Doug Baldwin, had refused to go back into Seattle’s Week 6 loss to Dallas, and that there was a divide forming in the locker room between Harvin and Russell Wilson.
Seattle’s quarterback addressed that latest report Thursday, denying that such a rift ever existed.
“Percy and I never had differences,” Wilson said. “We had a lot of similarities, probably if anything. We’re guys who want to compete at the highest level, want to win every single time we step on the field, want the ball in our hands to make the big play and everything. I’m not sure why the media chose to blow everything out of proportion. It’s part of it, I guess. You have to deal with it, but you also have to ignore it too. Like I always tell you guys, I ignore the noise. Percy’s a Virginia guy and I wish nothing but the best for him.”
Wilson also said there was no division in Seattle’s locker room, not before the trade and not now: “There’s no division in our locker room, there’s none at all. If anything I think we’ve continued to build, continued to grow. I truly believe that. The guys that we have in the locker room, the guys who believe we can still go 1-0 and still be a championship team, those are the guys we have sitting in this room every day. Every morning when we wake up, we’re looking for one common goal, that’s to win football games.”
Of course if all of what Wilson is saying true, then people are going to question why the trade happened. Wilson’s answer to that?
“That’s for the front office to decide,” he said. “I don’t know much about it, to be honest with you. At the end of the day, I believe Percy’s going to do a great job (in New York). Like I’ve said, he’s a great football player. For whatever reason it didn’t work here, but I know he’ll do a great job, and I know we’re excited about the guys we have, too.”
Asked about the morale of the team after a 3-3 start, Wilson said, “I don’t think there’s any added pressure… We haven’t played our best football. We’ve played some good football, and we’ve played some great football against some great teams — you think about the Packers, you think about the Broncos, some other teams — so that’s the part you have to grab on to. We lost to the Cowboys, a team that’s arguably one of the best teams in football right now, we were up 23-20 with third-and-20, and Tony Romo makes a great play. He’s a great quarterback and he made an unbelievable play. There’s so many great things that we’re doing, there’s a few things we need to fix, but that’s the part we lean on, that’s the part we practice for, that’s where we believe we’re going to step up and make the plays when we need to.”
And on the attitude of the team following the trade, he said, “In terms of Percy, like I said last week, we wish him nothing but the best. I’m praying for him that it works out there in New York. In terms of our locker room, our locker room is great. We have guys who are very positive, guys who really want to work and really want to win, and that’s what we need. We need that for sure, and we have that. That’s what we’re relying on, the positive mentality of the guys we have in the room.”
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