Los Angeles Clippers Rumors
Mirjam Swanson: Clippers injury update heading into Dallas: Lou Williams is questionable (sore right hamstring); Danilo Gallinari (low back spasms) and Luc Mbah a Moute (sore left knee) are out.
It wasn’t that Griffin was angered by the trade. He was angry that he heard about it third-person. He was angry that as friendly as Rivers can be, he didn’t bother to pick up the phone and inform his franchise player, tabbed a “Clipper for life” when he signed a five-year, $173 million contract extension in June 2017.
“I haven’t spoken to him,” Rivers said of Griffin. “That’s happened many times in my career, so I don’t make a big deal of that. You guys do, but I don’t at all. I’ve had some guys, even some guys I’m very close to — most trades and departures don’t go very well, for the record. They just don’t. I can cite you 100 of them, Kendrick Perkins [in Boston], who was like my son. Nah, they don’t go well. We all come back eventually.”
“He’s not my coach anymore,” Griffin said of Rivers. “It was cool to be welcomed back like that [with a tribute video]. I appreciate all the fans. It was nice to get that game out of the way. It’s kind of compared to the first game of the year, in a way. It’s such a big hype, and now you’ve got to play 81 and now we’ve got to play 41 more or whatever it is. It’s over and we’ve got a lot of basketball left.”
“Coming from a Caucasian mother and African-American father, nobody else symbolizes everything I’ve gone through, what my family has gone through, what black and white people in general who have been together have been through more than Martin,” Rivers said. “I just thought he was the only person fitting to have tattooed on me other than Jesus. I don’t want to repeat the things I heard growing up because I don’t want to shed light on ignorance.”
Austin Rivers: “My parents had to go through much worse dating in the era they did — a white woman dating a black guy when my mom was in college. We had people in the KKK come burn our house down in San Antonio. I don’t like to talk about this. I was 4 years old. I remember what the house looked like. I remember my mom … There’s been a lot of things happen to my family, a lot of things happen to my mom and dad, specifically. It means a lot more than people think it means. I don’t just have Martin Luther King on my leg for no reason.”
Jovan Buha: Lou Williams (sore right hamstring) and Danilo Gallinari (lower back spasms) are out tonight, per Doc Rivers. Rivers did not reveal who’s starting in Gallinari’s spot:
