Blake Griffin says he never intended on changing DeAndre Jordan’s mind
By Josh Hill
The Los Angeles Clippers now infamous hostage crisis with DeAndre Jordan gets painted in a new light by Blake Griffin.
Leave it to the ever entertaining Blake Griffin to put a spin on the DeAndre Jordan hostage crisis in a way that makes the Clippers look like just a bunch of guys doing another guy a solid.
That’s picture painted by the Clippers star in his re-telling of the incident for the Players Tribune.
In his first-person account of the DeAndre Jordan hostage crisis, Griffin notes that he never intended on flying to Houston to convince Jordan to re-sign with the Clippers. Instead, the former Sooner says he was there just to be a friend to a guy who needed a shoulder to cry on.
"“By Tuesday morning [July 7th], I knew he was really struggling with it,” Griffin wrote in part about Jordan. “He really didn’t want to disappoint people, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. We text every day. It’s not always about basketball. Mostly it’s about life. I’m his friend above all else. I stuffed some clothes into a bag, ran through LAX and got on the first flight to Houston. My intention wasn’t to go down and sell DeAndre on the Clippers. We promised each other a long time ago that we’d never do that stuff. I just wanted to be there for my friend and hear him out.”"
There’s no doubting that Griffin was probably going out to Houston with good intentions in his heart. It’s also very plausible that long the way, he figured out that Jordan could be turned back from the Dark Side and he could be convinced to re-sign with the Clippers.
It might not have been a light switch realization, rather a slow burn that finally triggered the idea for Griffin.
Then again, the way he describes Jordan in his account of the hostage crisis, it appears that DJ was never sold on leaving Los Angeles and was only going to sign with the Mavericks because he felt bad about going back on his word.
Either way, when the Mavericks and Clippers get together in Dallas this season, things will probably be a lot less poetic.