No respect for the Spurs?
Published 9:00 pm Friday, May 13, 2005
SEATTLE – Jerome James has two of the biggest feet in the NBA – he wears size 22 shoes – so it’s a little hard to believe that he could actually put one of said feet into his mouth.
But it happened on Thursday night, moments after the Seattle SuperSonics completed a rousing 92-91 victory over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 3 of their Western Conference semifinal playoff series.
James, who scored 15 points and shot 7-for-7 from the field, did a national television interview on the court and closed with these words about the Spurs:
“We have no respect for them now. None.”
A whole bunch of basketball fans across the country heard those remarks. Likewise, the other Sonics players and coaches. And – we’ll go way out on a limb here – so did a squad of disbelieving Spurs, maybe several times in the intervening hours.
In the few seconds it took him to utter his comments, James probably became a persona non grata in San Antonio and perhaps the individual most responsible for giving the Spurs a motivational boost for Sunday’s Game 4 at KeyArena.
Given the chance to backpedal on Friday, James did – sort of.
“They are a great team, no doubt,” he said, adding, “What I meant is that we have to play with an attitude that’s disrespectful. … It’s sudden-death to us. We would surely die if we gave them the respect they’ve earned from the way they’ve played all season long and in the past. It was merely a statement of passion, saying, ‘Look, we have to play disrespectful. We have to play as if we’re the better team. We have to believe that. We have to come out with that attitude because that’s the only way we can win.’”
Asked if he wanted to retract his statement, James shook his head. “No, it’s out there,” he said. “It’s time to deal with it.”
The other Sonics were plainly unhappy about the entire matter. Both at James, no doubt, and because they were bombarded by questions from a large gathering of media after Friday’s practice, including several San Antonio reporters.
“We definitely don’t need to light a fire under anybody, that’s for sure,” guard Antonio Daniels said. “We just have to go out on the floor and play basketball. Our talking should be on the floor, not through you guys.”
Guard Ray Allen spent several minutes speaking with James following the workout. Later, Allen made his best attempt at damage control.
“We respect that team 100 percent,” he said. “We’ve watched them playing basketball when all of us were on vacation. We watched them win a championship. We respect them because they’ve done a lot to be respected. And (James) knows that. But in the heat of battle, you win a game and you feel like you’re on top of the world.
“Jerome is a very prideful guy … and he wants people to respect him. But I told him, the more we win, the more we all get respected. I always tell him, be humble when you win. Because just as things go well for you, they can also go bad for you.”
James is a relative novice to the playoff experience, Allen added, “and he’s seeing this stuff for the first time. He’s dealing with … being on a world stage where people are analyzing him and criticizing everything he says and does. Everything you do is being looked at under the microscope and he’s learning that. So this is a great big wakeup call for him.”
