NBA: 20 Past Players That Would Have Owned Twitter
By Bill Speros
8. Latrell Sprewell
About 400 million people daily post or read Twitter and another 1 billion or so are regular Facebook users. Imagine, if you will, a major NBA player choking his coach during practice and that news, or perhaps ever a video clip of it, hitting social media in 2016.
The entire power grid of the United States would be in peril, never mind the high-speed WiFi at the local Starbucks.
In 1997 while playing for the Golden State Warriors when the franchise was considered an NBA laughingstock, Sprewell choked then-head coach P.J. Carlesimo after an argument during which he threatened to murder him.
Spree returned to the practice court 20 minutes later to try to finish the job with his fists.
The NBA suspended Sprewell for a year for the incident, the Warriors terminated his $32 million contract, and he signed with the Knicks once his suspension was finished the following season.
Even before he choked his coach, Sprewell had gotten into fights with teammates Byron Houston and Jerome
Kersey. After he fought Kersey, he came back to practice with a 2-by-4 and threatened to bring a gun. His NBA career ended after he rejected a three-year, $21 million contract extension from the Timberwolves in 2005 as too low.
His reasoning? He had “a family to feed” and needed more money or his kids would end up “in one of those Sally Struthers commercials.” He was making $14.6 million at the time.
Eventually, surprise, surprise, he somehow grounded a $1.5 million yacht while living in Milwaukee before it was seized, had two homes foreclosed upon, and was prohibited by a court from seeing his children after their mother sued him and alleged physical abuse.
Sprewell poked fun at himself in a Priceline commercial that aired earlier this year.
Yuk. Yuk.
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