Matt Barnes’ time with the 76ers sounds like it was pretty interesting
Sports Illustrated just a pretty great feature story by Chris Ballard — as if Chris Ballard writes anything other than great feature stories — on Los Angeles Clippers swingman Matt Barnes, who has spent the better part of the last dozen years developing a reputation as one of the NBA’s foremost pot-stirrers and enforcers, the kind of guy you love when he’s on your favorite team, and hate when he’s not.
Despite having a set of tools that would seem to fit in just about everywhere — a 6-foot-7 frame and the athleticism to guard multiple perimeter positions, a nose for the ball and an ability to run the floor, a willingness to do dirty work and check anybody, inarguable toughness, etc. — Barnes hasn’t ever really been able to stick around anywhere, bouncing around to eight teams in 12 years (including a pair of stints with the Clips) with no stay lasting longer than two seasons until this current stay in L.A.
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You learn a lot in becoming a journeyman, though, and one of the earliest NBA lessons Barnes relates came from his 2005-06 tenure with the Philadelphia 76ers. When Barnes got to Pennsylvania, the legendary Allen Iverson — still regarded by some as “pound for pound” the best scorer ever to lace ’em up — was several years removed from that magical 2000-01 MVP season, coming off two straight losing seasons and only about a year away from a trade to the Denver Nuggets, which would represent the beginning of a long, slow, somewhat sad end to Iverson’s playing career. That would come later, though; at the time, A.I. was A.I., and A.I. wanted to party:
“Allen was the first guy that showed me how NBA players spend money in strip clubs,” Barnes says. “That guy went. HARD. He’d throw so much money, and this was when I was first in the league, that I used to take my foot and scoop the s— under my chair and either re-throw it or put some in my pocket. He’d throw $30,000, $40,000 every time we went. I’m like, ‘You realize what I can do with this money?’”
There are a lot of possible answers here, but I’m going to go with “get more tattoos.”
In all seriousness, I can’t at all fault Barnes — who at that point had yet to make anything more than the NBA minimum salary after spending his first couple of professional seasons in the D-League, the ABA and on a low-money deal with the Clips — for perhaps taking advantage of Iverson’s largesse every now and again during a trip to the gentlemen’s club. After all, not only was “The Answer” banking eight figures a year in those salad days, but he also had a sweet shoe deal with Reebok; if A.I. was feeling like he could make it monsoon to the tune of $30,000 to $40,000 in a single storm, then there’s no reason he couldn’t also set a 12th man up with some extra meal or shopping money, right? And it’s not like he had a crystal ball to foresee the eventual financial troubles that would crop up — to whatever extent they big-picture matter — after Iverson’s playing days ended. (To say nothing of the myriad other off-court issues.)
But while Iverson wound up being Barnes’ unwitting benefactor, then-Sixers coach Maurice Cheeks wound up being the young wing’s unwelcome motivator. More from Ballard:
Philly is also where Barnes learned that it’s a star’s league. At the time, he was the 12th man, clinging to a job. As Barnes tells it, he was working with shooting coach Buzz Braman after practice, hoping to smooth out a hitch in his shot, when Sixers head coach Mo Cheeks walked by. “I don’t see why you’re working on your shot,” Cheeks said. “You’re not going to get to shoot here.” Barnes fumed, but said nothing.
A week later, in practice, things came to a head. “I came down on a 3-on-1 and hit pull-up 15-footer off the glass and [Cheeks] stopped practice,” says Barnes. “He yells, ‘What are you doing? What are you shooting the ball for? You know that’s not your job, you gotta pass the ball!’”
Barnes was shocked. “What? But I made the shot.”
Said Cheeks: “That’s why you don’t play.’”
And then, Barnes says, he lost it. “I was going to chase him down and whoop his ass, so I took off after him and AI grabbed me and I got through him and Chris [Webber] grabbed me and bearhugged me and I said to Mo, ‘You’re lucky.’”
Says Barnes now: “I hated Mo Cheeks. He was a dick.” […]
While Barnes never found his footing under Cheeks in Philadelphia, he’d later catch on with the Golden State Warriors, where noted chaos-bringing coach Don Nelson had a much higher comfort level with letting the mercurial Barnes try stuff and play through mistakes. As a result, Barnes would soon be able to put an emphatic exclamation point on the end of his time with Mo:
By late December, when the Sixers came to town, Barnes was a starter, the perfect hybrid athlete for the run-and-gun, position-less style of Nellieball. Before the game, he told his coach how much he hated Cheeks. Nellie smiled and laughed that Nellie laugh. “Alright,” he said. “Do your thing tonight.’”
That evening, at Oracle arena, Barnes scored 25 points while hitting seven three-pointers. To this day, it remains perhaps the best shooting night of his life. And every time he sank a jumper, he turned and let Cheeks hear it. Colorfully.
“Colorfully” seems as good a word as any to describe Ballard’s engaging look behind the curtain of one of the NBA’s longstanding premier role players; the whole piece is worth your time. Maybe not “$30,000 to $40,000” worth it, but still: pretty good.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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