One of the stranger moments in recent NBA history came when the Los Angeles Clippers hosted the Houston Rockets back in 2018, the first time that Chris Paul played the Clippers in L.A. after his time with the team came to an end. The long and the short of it is that, after a game that got a bit testy, Paul allegedly used secret tunnels at the Staples Center (it was not called Crypto.com Arena yet) to get the Rockets to the Clippers’ locker room, where a fight nearly broke out.
It’s a famous moment for plenty of reasons, most notably an all-time great Inside the NBA segment about it. And while we’ve had some people speak about it over the years, a recent appearance DeAndre Jordan made on Paul George’s podcast went into more detail than we’ve ever gotten about the whole thing.
Jordan, who was on the Clippers at the time but could not play in the game due to a sprained ankle, simply said “a lot of it’s true” about the ordeal, then dove into the emotions around the game and some of the trash talk that the two teams engaged in throughout the game. In particular, he pointed out two unnamed players (Austin Rivers, who was on the Clippers, and Trevor Ariza, who was on the Rockets) who got a little too riled up during the game, which boiled over after it ended thanks to the hallways work in the building.
“You know how the hallway is, the visitor’s side,” Jordan told George. “If you walk through the back, you can get to the Clippers locker room. So, I’m sitting at my locker … and then all of a sudden, I see the homie from the Rockets right here, and I’m like, ‘What you doing, bro? You can’t be up in here.'”
As Jordan tells it, Ariza said he was looking for someone, then went “I’m looking for that motherf*cker right there.” While he tried to make sure Ariza — who he knew — left and tried to push him out of the locker room, he eventually made quite the realization.
“When I pushed him out to the hallway, I see the whole Rockets team,” Jordan said. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, sh*t.’ I’m like, this ain’t for me! You know what I mean? I’m like, ‘Bro, what y’all doing?’ ‘No, we just want to talk to so and so, we just wanna talk to him!’ We’re like, y’all not talking to him. All 15 of y’all wanna talk to him? No, that’s not happening.”
Jordan said, after turning around, he saw his whole team, with one unnamed player holding a weight in their hand. Security eventually came in and got everything sorted out, and while it’s a great story from Jordan, I do wish he could have told it to Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal.
