Last season was rough for Blake Griffin. He only played in 35 regular season games and four playoff games before suffering another injury that doomed the Clippers’ season. This was largely because of a quad injury, but more ignominiously he also missed time after he broke his hand punching his friend, who also happens to be on the Clippers’ equipment staff. Griffin, for his part, agrees that last season was not ideal for him, and he also is taking full responsibility for his hand-breaking, face-punching incident.
Griffin wrote a letter, titled “To Clippers Fans,” for The Players’ Tribune. Griffin doesn’t mince words, beginning the piece by writing, “I’ll just get this out of the way. Last season sucked.” Then, the four-time All-Star gets into the incident:
“I am truly sorry. What happened in Toronto was 100% my fault. I messed up. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. And I don’t mean that in some clichéd “not a day goes by” way. I genuinely think about it every single day, and I just feel like I let down the fans who have been riding with us since the beginning.”
Griffin reiterates his apology again in the piece, before discussing his time with the Clippers and their relationship with the Lakers and the city of Los Angeles. He ends the latter with an anecdote about calling his brother Taylor after the incident in Toronto, where his brother asked him, “Man, what are you doing?” This, apparently greatly impacted Griffin.
“To hear that from him, somebody I’ve looked up to my whole life, who always tells me what I need to hear, that’s when I had a pretty big realization about who I am, and who I want to be. I don’t want to say what that realization was. I just want to go out and show you.”
Griffin seems determined to put last season behind him. If he can stay on the court, he could be in for a huge bounce back season.
(Via The Players’ Tribune)
