Chris Ballard has penned a fantastic Sport Illustrated feature on Clippers forward Matt Barnes, and it’s chock full of great stories from, arguably, the NBA’s most misunderstood journeyman. Two of the juiciest tales occurred during his brief stint with the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2005-06 season. First, there was the time Barnes almost killed head coach Mo Cheeks during a practice. At the time, Barnes was clinging to a career on a team featuring a still-in-his-prime Allen Iverson and an over-the-hill Chris Webber. According to Barnes, it was Iverson and C-Webb who prevented a nasty showdown at practice one day.
As Barnes tells it, he was working with shooting coach Buzz Braman after practice, hoping to smooth out a hitch in his shot, when Sixers head coach Mo Cheeks walked by. “I don’t see why you’re working on your shot,” Cheeks said. “You’re not going to get to shoot here.” Barnes fumed, but said nothing.
A week later, in practice, things came to a head. “I came down on a 3-on-1 and hit pull-up 15-footer off the glass and [Cheeks] stopped practice,” says Barnes. “He yells, ‘What are you doing? What are you shooting the ball for? You know that’s not your job, you gotta pass the ball!’”
Barnes was shocked “What? But I made the shot.”
Said Cheeks: “That’s why you don’t play.’”
And then, Barnes says, he lost it. “I was going to chase him down and whoop his ass, so I took off after him and AI grabbed me and I got through him and Chris [Webber] grabbed me and bearhugged me and I said to Mo, ‘You’re lucky.’”
Says Barnes now: “I hated Mo Cheeks. He was a dick.”
Later in the piece, Ballard says that Barnes likes pretty much every coach he’s played for. Except for Mo Cheeks, of course. Speaking of Iverson, Barnes also shared some of the diminutive guard’s spending habits. Specifically, his strip club spending.
“Allen was the first guy that showed me how NBA players spend money in strip clubs,” Barnes says. “That guy went. HARD. He’d throw so much money, and this was when I was first in the league, that I used to take my foot and scoop the s— under my chair and either re-throw it or put some in my pocket. He’d throw $30,000, $40,000 every time we went. I’m like, ‘You realize what I can do with this money?’”
Iverson’s lavish spending (and resulting financial woes) has been well documented, but to put those numbers in perspective, he was making $16.5 million that season. Barnes was only making about $500,000, meaning he routinely watched AI make it rain to the tune of roughly ten percent of his salary. Can’t even hate on him pocketing all those hundreds.
[SI, photo: AP]
