Former players Antonio Davis, Tim Legler rip D'Angelo Russell
Antonio Davis said he could not play with Lakers guard D'Angelo Russell.
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3 min read
The Golden State Warriors are on pace to break the all-time wins record, Kobe Bryant has seven games left in his career. And the No. 1 story in the NBA is … one Los Angeles Lakers guard filming another Lakers guard talking about infidelity. This D'Angelo Russell-Nick Young fiasco has somehow overshadowed everything else happening in the league in the last couple of days, and Russell's role in it has deeply upset not only his teammates, but former players as well.
"If you're on my team, we spend so much time together and we go through everything together, we're more than just friends." said ESPN NBA analyst Antonio Davis, who played for 13 seasons and is a former president of the NBA Players Association. "We're like brothers because of everything we've gone through. So for your brother to do something like that and for it to end up on social media, that's lower than low. It says so much about [Russell]. I think it might get so bad that he's going to have to be traded. If I'm on that team, I'm not playing with him. It would literally be hard for me to sit in the locker room with him."
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"Fortunately for D'Angelo Russell, that team is in such flux there will be a tremendous amount of roster turnover, and that could help him a little bit," said ESPN NBA analyst Tim Legler, who played for 10 seasons. "But even new guys coming in are going to know about this event. It's a shady thing to do. People can write it off as immaturity, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think it speaks to your integrity as a person and your overall trustworthiness. It's going to be a difficult thing for him to shed. I don't know how you recover from something like this."
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"If I'm a rookie and I'm asking my vet, who's engaged, what really happens, I'm getting that information to help me with the game and in the streets," Davis said. "I'm not shooting a documentary and putting it on Snapchat. C'mon dude. It just sheds some light on D'Angelo Russell and who he really is. Can this guy be trusted? For you to be at my house or for me to be at your house and you to record me like that? It's almost like he's setting him up. It's crazy. This is going to follow him. ... It's never going away."
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"The only way you gain favor back is if the offended party forgives you and says, 'We're good,'" said Lakers radio broadcaster Mychal Thompson, who had a 13-year NBA career. "I think that will depend on how this affects Nick's personal life and the ramifications of this. That's something D'Angelo is going to have to hope works out. This is a unique situation, but this won't follow him forever. We have short memories. There will be another story that captures our attention."
I'm with Mychal Thompson here: this will be forgotten eventually. Russell is 20 years old and has the potential to be a star. If he reaches his potential and has a long career in the NBA, it will be nothing but a footnote. A few years ago, all most people knew about Thompson's son, Klay, was that he smoked some marijuana in college. How often does that come up now?
For now, though, things will be pretty weird for Russell. As well as playing in a huge media market and handling the pressure of being a No. 2 pick, this incident means that he is facing the ire of a bunch of people he has never met. This is apparently the consequence of violating locker-room code.
CBS Sports analysts Raja Bell and Rip Hamilton were also among those dismayed by the video becoming public. Bell said that, if he was the general manager of the Lakers, he would trade Russell.
On Wednesday, Russell apologized for the incident, both in an interview with The Vertical's Adrian Wojnarowski and in a press conference at the Staples Center before the Lakers' 102-100 win over the Miami Heat. From his comments, it sounds like this was a prank gone wrong, not anything malicious, though it is still unclear how the video found its way onto a gossip website. Regardless of your thoughts about how this has been framed -- why, exactly, is Russell getting so much more vitriol than Young? -- it will clearly take time for Russell to repair his reputation.
