Lance Stephenson will more likely be remembered for being a nuisance to LeBron James than anything else. And while Stephenson’s most famous juvenile move involved blowing in LeBron’s ear during the 2014 playoffs, that wasn’t his most egregious transgression — at least in the eyes of LeBron’s teammates on the Heat.
Danny Granger was Stephenson’s teammate on the Pacers when the Stephenson-James thing was, you know, an actual thing. According to Granger, Stephenson’s “choke sign” toward LeBron during the ’12 playoffs was what got the Heat worked up. It was so bad, in fact, that Chris Andersen, Udonis Haslem, and Juwan Howard decided they wanted to pay Stephenson a visit on an off day.
“[They] came to our locker room looking for Lance Stephenson. They were searching him out,” Granger told Sirius XM NBA radio. “That’s a huge no-no. This was on an off day. I got involved, words were exchanged and whatnot.”
Granger added the trio made up the leadership of the Heat at the time and that “they were protecting LeBron. They thought Lance had done something disrespectful to him.”
The whole thing amounted to nothing, but it sounds like it could have morphed into something had they gotten ahold of Stephenson. Granger also highlighted the always-important hierarchy in the league between younger and veteran players, which threw another level onto the Stephenson-James kerfuffle. Basically, Stephenson was getting on a lot of people’s nerves. Not that you didn’t know that already.
(Via The Score)
