DeAndre Jordan used Snapchat to get the ball rolling on his return to the Los Angeles Clippers, because of course he freaking did.
Talking to Sports Illustrated‘s Justin Barraso, Doc Rivers proved to be chock full of interesting anecdotes. One such story included DJ snapchatting Rivers’ son—not Austin, but Spencer—after agreeing to sign with the Mavericks.
Nope, we’re not kidding (h/t Deadspin):
“DeAndre thought about leaving, but right away, he knew he wanted to come back,” said Rivers. “He even Snapchatted my youngest son Spencer. He had told two or three people he’d made a mistake [after signing the offer sheet with Dallas], but the Snapchat said, ‘Tell your dad to call me.’”
Welp.
As someone who has at least tried to defend Jordan over the past couple months, even if only to play devil’s advocate, I find this damning. Jordan was going on 27 years old at the time, and he was using Snapchat to, essentially, author a plan that would screw over another team. That’s not the best look.
All along we’ve had this vision of Jordan grappling over the decision, almost to the point where you can empathize with the gravity of the situation, in the sense that, while fortunate, he still had to make a life-changing choice. Maybe that was still the case to some extent. Maybe he went back and forth with Blake Griffin, trying to talk or text (or Snapchat) his way through what was a truly difficult situation. And maybe he had some other preliminary contact with Rivers and expressed his concerns before ever snapchatting Spencer.
But the role of Snapchat in this, however marginal, however inconsequential, makes it seem like free agency was, on some level, a process Jordan didn’t take serious enough. And he was already on wafer thin ice before now. That’s what happens when you verbally commit to one team, only to pull the dip a few days later amid a social-media frenzy that was, per various reports, compounded by your refusal to give the team to which you initially committed the time of day.
And as Kevin Draper pointed out for Deadspin, there’s more than one layer of irony in knowing that Jordan both used a third party to get in touch with his coach of two flipping years and is apparently closer with Spencer than Austin, who was his teammate for a half-season.
Unless, of course, Jordan just did this whole Snapchat thing for laughs, treating it as just a fun, creative way of burning the sanctity of moratorium free-agency agreements to the ground.
Knowing all we know now, we can’t rule that out.
We can’t rule anything out.
