Photo Credit: David Liam Kyle/Getty Images

Baron Davis Explains How It Was Playing For Donald Sterling’s Clippers

Three years ago, TMZ Sports released a recording of a conversation between then-Clippers owner Donald Sterling and his mistress, in which he said:

 

“It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. You can sleep with black people. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is … not to bring them to my games”.

This thankfully led to Sterling being banned from the league for life and fined $2.5 million, the maximum fine allowed by the NBA constitution. He then also was forced to sell the team.

Now, Baron Davis was on ESPN’s The Hoop Collective podcast and gave some insigth on how it was to play for Donald Sterling.

..it was almost like the movie “Get Out.” It was like you walking in training camp, dude, and everybody was like, ‘Yo, what the f— you so happy for?’ And I was like, ‘S—, we about to play a season.’ And it’s like, ‘Nah, he comin’.’

And when he came in, he just sittin’ there, I saw at that moment he had no respect for nobody. You know? He had no respect for nobody. He couldn’t look nobody in the eye. And everything he was saying to people was like stuff you never say to somebody on their first day at the job. And so, for me, he rubbed me wrong from the jump because I ain’t like it. And the way that the whole Clippers system was set up … it was set up to protect him. Protect him from the media. Protect him from us, from saying stuff to us….

I say the worst thing he probably did was when we lost a game and he came in the locker room. And he walked in the locker room and looked at me. He looked at everybody in the locker, and he went down the row, one by one, and he cussed everybody out. And he picked on Al Thornton, who was a rookie from Georgia. Who didn’t really know what was going on because Mike Dunleavy was puttin’ him out there to just tryna score. You know what I mean? And he dogged Al Thornton cold. And so that’s what I was like, ‘Hold on, dude. This dude ain’t right.’ Like, he don’t even know this kid … he just a kid.”

Transcription via The Undefeated