Like head coach Mike D’Antoni, assistant Roy Rogers, Jr. is in his first season with the Houston Rockets. The former pro out of Alabama — he played in the NBA from 1996 to 2000 and was last playing professionally in Poland three years later — had his first game on the bench this past Sunday in China when the Rockets took on the Shanghai Sharks.
All the other assistant coaches on the Rockets have substantially more time coaching the team from the sideline. Perhaps that explains cameras catching Roy going 0-for-3 as he attempted to give his fellow coaches some dap/handshake/high-five. The problem was they couldn’t coordinate which of the three they were going to use.
His first attempt was a handshake with a coach off camera, but you can clearly see he’s met with a limp, half-assed palm that’s so bent at the wrist, it’s like he’s a plebe greeting the Dowager Countess after a particularly wet and muddy day of shooting at Downton Abbey.
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For kids looking to impress, limp handshakes are the worst, so when you’re offered a hand, embrace it with confidence and shake it like an adult with zero hesitation. But this also means you don’t try to crush the other person’s hand like you’re trying out for Over the Top. We don’t know what qualifies us to dole out that advice, but ask anyone and they’ll tell you we’re excellent at DAP.
But Rogers’ next interaction, this time with head coach Mike D’Antoni, might be worse.
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D’Antoni, despite having just seen a handshake turn into a lame high-five, throws a fist at Rogers, and they both mistime the interaction so Rogers ends up just shaking D’Antoni’s wrist below the balled-up fist.
Poor Roy isn’t done getting duped by his fellow coaches, either. His final attempt at a normal salutation with a peer comes on his other side with an extended offer of a fist bump that comes so fast, he doesn’t have time to actually bump it.
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Instead, it looks like the other coach offers the fist bump and then takes it away like he was Lucy, Roy was Charlie Brown, and his extended fist was the football.
This will get easier for Roy, but the dreadful DAP almost makes it seem like they were trolling him. You can do better, guys. Give Roy a break, he’s new.
(H/T SB Nation)
