Blake Griffin finally escapes basketball ‘jail’
The final difficult hurdle for Blake Griffin may have been Tuesday night when NBA action started. That’s when he settled in to watch Miami-Boston and quickly felt that holiday feeling.
It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas … well, Christmas in October.
“Oh yeah, definitely,” he said after the Clippers’ morning shootaround Wednesday. “Last night, somebody texted me, ‘This is like Christmas Eve for you, isn’t it?’ I was like, ‘Exactly.’
“Last night, I started watching the game, I guess it started at 4:30. That’s what I was doing all night. Last night was the longest night of my life.”
The longest night of what has been the longest year for him after sitting out last season because of an injured knee. Recalling that time, Griffin smiled, saying: “It was extremely tough. I’d like to call it basketball jail.”
Officially, freedom came Wednesday at 7:43 p.m.
Injury report
Feeling the hurt, of late, was center DeAndre Jordan, who took an elbow in the right eye from Griffin on Monday in practice. His eye was still quite red Wednesday, and he was sporting protective eye wear.
Think Amare Stoudemire and you get the general idea.
“They fog up a little bit,” Jordan said of his glasses.
Still, he seems to be adjusting, changing his mind about the way they made him look.
“I think it makes me looks like a tough guy,” Jordan said, laughing.
Rookie watch
Griffin, though still a rookie, is managing to avoid the hazing hitting the three other Clippers rookies. And so he didn’t have to wear a prom-type tuxedo into the building as the other three did for Wednesday’s game.
Eric Bledsoe had a powder blue tux. “Real stylish … mine was kind of big. Farouq’s was small,” he said, referring to Al-Farouq Aminu.
So, how was this going to go down in his hometown of Birmingham, Ala., or back at the University of Kentucky?
Bledsoe laughed at that thought. “Text messages like crazy,” he said. “ … Especially people I made fun of — they’re going to get me back.”
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