Former NBA player Baron Davis was a guest on ‘The Draymond Green Show’, where he spoke about his time with the Los Angeles Clippers between 2008 to 2011. Davis noted that the Clippers were a poorly run organization, and shed insight into his dealings with disgraced former owner Donald Sterling.
“It was very hard for me (not going to the Lakers). I always wanted to play for the Lakers and be a Laker. My entire career, every time I tried, and then I was like ‘F*ck it’, I guess I’m the underdog guy so I go to the Clippers. In three years, I’ll be able to create a ‘We Believe’ type of magic with the Clippers if we can get the right people involved.”
“Going to the Clippers was the worst. I thought the Warriors were bad. It was like a bad soap opera. The Clippers, it was like a bad soap opera in prison… You walk into the Clippers facility, you’re like, ‘Man, who is about to snitch on me now, where are these f*cking cameras at?!’…”
“Who’s crying today? Somebody is crying, pissed off, and it’s all because of the owner… Before I get to the gym, I gotta have all kinds of diplomatic conversations. This is Donald Sterling… With Sterling, he used the team as his duck-off business, his PR. All the sh*t that he did was through the team.”
“He was just a weirdo, just having weird people around him. I felt like anyone who hung around that dude had to be a weird motherf*cker, because he was like beyond weird. Not that he was a racist, he was a hate everybody-ist… He was delusional and hating. So he would say anything to anybody. Woman, man, black, brown…”
From 0:25
Donald Sterling is famously considered the worst owner in NBA history, not just for his disgusting comments in 2013, but also for the horrible way he managed the Clippers, and their not finding any success under his ownership. So to hear the chaotic environment he had created in the Clippers organization is not surprising.
Baron Davis Shares Ridiculous Donald Sterling Story
In the same podcast episode, Baron Davis shared a story of Donald Sterling bringing multiple elderly women to the Clippers locker room after a game. Many players, including Davis, had just gotten out of the shower, and it was an incredibly awkward situation for all the players in the locker room.
“He brought some old-a** ladies at the end of the game… They walk in, it’s like seven old-a** white ladies. He walks into the locker room, we had won. He didn’t even wait for them to get (out) of the shower.”
“He pointed at me and said, ‘Especially him’. This lady was just hanging out in my locker room. I’m sitting there, being respectful, and she’s just talking like, ‘Oh, where are you from?’… Like, wait for me to get up. It was foul, bro, it was hella foul.”
4:39 onwards
Sterling was ousted from his Clippers ownership by the NBA in 2013, as he was caught on tape making racist statements. This entire saga was recently turned into a limited series on FX called ‘Clipped’.
Steve Balmer would eventually purchase the Clippers from Sterling for $2 billion. There is no place in the NBA for the kind of views and comments Donald Sterling made, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver did a good job forcing him out of the league.
The Clippers, under Balmer, have experienced better fortunes, but are still yet to reach an NBA Finals, let alone win an NBA Championship. Clippers fans will be hopeful that the move to their new arena, the Intuit Dome, could usher in a new era for the team, one filled with NBA championships and banners from the rafters.
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