Following the Philadelphia 76ers’ 84-80 loss to the Boston Celtics on Wednesday night, Jahlil Okafor was involved in a fight outside a bar in Beantown.
TMZ broke the story, providing the following details:
It all went down after Okafor and the 76ers lost to the Boston Celtics — Jahlil and some friends went out on the town … and ended up in an altercation in front of Storyville Boston nightclub.
19-year-old Okafor was screaming at the other man, “We got money you broke ass n**ga.”A scuffle ensues — people tried to hold Okafor back — but then he escapes and swings wildly at another man … connecting … and sending him flying to the ground.
In the melee, Okafor tumbles to the ground and a man in a green jacket tries to punch the 6’11” superstar in the back of the head.
We’re told everyone got up and fled the scene and no arrests were made.
We’re told the altercation began because one of the men in the other group yelled at Jahlil, “The 76ers suck.”
We spoke with a rep for Jahlil who tells us … Okafor says he was being heckled from the moment he left the club and felt threatened because people swarmed him on the street.
He says he was with a teammate — who he wouldn’t name — and says someone got physical with the teammate … so Jahlil did what he felt he needed to do to protect himself and his friend.
They immediately left after the incident.
This certainly isn’t a good look for Okafor, and the NBA is most definitely going to investigate.
The details seem a bit hazy, but if “The 76ers suck” is all it took to send Okafor into a tizzy, that’s an issue. And perhaps that’s the symptom of being 0-16. Okafor, still only 19, hasn’t won a basketball game since he was at Duke, and the Sixers had just blown an 11-point lead against the Celtics. That he then proceeded to go clubbing in clearly hostile territory—if you’ve ever been to Boston, you know it’s a sports or die town—couldn’t have helped matters.
It’s easy to chalk this up to a teenage mistake. On some level, that’s just what it is. Professional athletes are held to higher standards—that’s the thought anyway—because they make a crap ton of money and are constantly in the public’s eye, but they’re still people. Okafor isn’t even 20 years old, and he plays for a team that has blatantly devalued the presence of veterans and, by extensions, leadership.
Sure, there’s little point grasping for way to relate this incident to basketball. Again, we don’t even technically know everything. All we do know is that, not yet 25 games into his NBA career, Okafor still has a lot to learn—both on and off the court.
