Paul George Rumors
All NBA Players
Position: F
Born: 05/02/90
Height: 6-9 / 2.06
Weight:220 lbs. / 99.8 kg.
Salary: $33,005,556
Born: 05/02/90
Height: 6-9 / 2.06
Weight:220 lbs. / 99.8 kg.
Salary: $33,005,556
Steve Ballmer was golfing with a longtime colleague and friend late last month when the conversation turned to what had happened a few days earlier. On a stage inside a standing-room-only recreation center in South Los Angeles, the Clippers owner burst out of his director’s chair, grabbed a microphone, and introduced superstar forwards Kawhi Leonard and Paul George with whoops and hollers that quickly went viral across social media. “It was kind of like our old sales meetings,” Jeff Raikes said Ballmer told him. “I knew what he was referring to.”
During the team’s July 1 free agency meeting with Leonard, Ballmer’s willingness to compete aggressively left a strong impression, according to a person who was there. “I think everybody was shocked when he pulled off the Kawhi-PG deal, but it’s a good statement of how he thinks about it,” Taylor said. “You’re not going to win anything, be it Microsoft or be it basketball, without the best people in the best roles.”
Yet the mere mention of the word “scrimmage,” for a U.S.A.B. contingent in Las Vegas, inevitably evokes images of what happened to George. That’s the reality even when both player and program can gratefully say, on this unpleasant five-year anniversary, that they have rebounded as well as anyone could have hoped. “It was a travesty when it took place, and it just put us back on our heels,” Jerry Colangelo, U.S.A.B.’s managing director, said Thursday on the eve of Friday’s scrimmage. “But time has a way of healing. The fact that Paul came back all the way and it didn’t affect his career, it kind of minimized what transpired.”
U.S.A.B.’s struggles to attract stars for this summer’s World Cup bid have been a persistent N.B.A. story line over the past month. Those troubles, though, are more often attributed to player apathy toward a non-Olympic tournament, along with general concerns about workload and travel amid the league’s rising “load management” movement, rather than fretting about a George repeat. “No, sir,” Boston’s Kemba Walker said when asked if he viewed George’s story as a cautionary tale before accepting U.S.A.B.’s invitation to be the face of this World Cup squad.
All of that would have been hard to imagine on Aug. 1, 2014, seeing George, with his right leg placed in an air cast and teammates like Plumlee all around him so visibly shaken, taken out of the Thomas & Mack on a stretcher. “Hard to watch,” Walker said, recalling the broadcast he watched that night while traveling in Atlanta. “Sad.” Said Colangelo: “If Paul had gone down for the count, it would have been tragic for him and for us. Thank God it didn’t go down that way.”
“I hate when people talk about certain guys and say they can’t work together,” Tucker said. “It may not work with Paul George and Kawhi Leonard [on the Los Angeles Clippers]. It may not work with Anthony Davis and LeBron James [on the Los Angeles Lakers]. It may not work with anybody. [Westbrook] is another super aggressive guy who can attack the rim and score the ball. That opens everything up for everyone else. [Harden and Westbrook] know each other’s games. They’ve played together when they were young and they’re excited to play together again. If they’re excited, I’m excited.”
