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Stephen Jackson Tells Insane Story of Smoking Weed Before Games

Throughout his entire 14-year NBA career, Stephen Jackson played with a bad boy persona and did a number of controversial things throughout it.

Before re-living a night where he, teammate Baron Davis, and head coach Don Nelson drank “two or three bottles of McCallan 12” a night before the beginning of a season, the one-time champion told an insane story on Michael Rapaport’s I Am Rapaport podcast about smoking weed with his teammates and even coach Nelson before games during his time in Golden State. Jackson was a member of the Warriors from 2006-2010.

I was going to give a brief preview of the story, but eh, let’s cut to the chase listen to the slick way Jackson and Baron Davis got around the NBA’s drug testing policy.

“Nobody knows this story, so this is the first time somebody is hearing this. We’re in Utah and the drug test people are around, you know, to get our last drug test so we can smoke, right? Don Nelson, we talked about weed all the time, he was cool with talking about weed. We got our last test in Utah, right? So me and Baron are coming out the locker room just screaming, excited with our last pink slip saying we could smoke for the rest of the season and Don Nelson hauls ass down there giving us high-fives like, “Yeah, we can smoke now!” It was cool, the fact that he knows what’s going on off the court with his players, which was great man. We enjoyed it. That’s why we were a great team.”

At the time, Golden State was one of the most exciting teams to watch in the NBA and Stephen Jackson was at the forefront of it averaging 20+ points per game in two of his for seasons with the team.

Jackson remembers what it was like during the games when he was playing with weed in his system.

“I can’t speak for nobody else. Me personally, I’ve done a lot of shit before games sometimes and still was able to go out there and be productive. I just gotta be real, you know, it’s been a couple games where I smoked before games and had great games. It’s been some games where I smoked before the game and was on the bench after three minutes sitting on the sideline, ‘please calm down, this high has to calm down,’ I done shot three shots that went over the backboard, like, I’m going to be honest, like ‘ahh, I gotta calm down.’”

The entire podcast was great, as Jackson and Rapaport’s discuss an array of NBA topics as well as what’s going on in the world today. Then, he dropped this hilarious story. Only you, Stephen Jackson… only you.