Brendan Haywood Calls LeBron James a Crybaby
The Washington Wizards may be on the verge of elimination from the playoffs, but that’s not stopping them from running their big, dumb yaps.
Apparently, the Wizards haven’t gotten the memo informing them that we’re all sick of their antics, and that we can’t wait for Lebron James and the Cavaliers to drive the last nail into their coffin.
LeBron is, of course, the main thing that’s bugging the Cavs. He’s picking them apart on the court, and apparently he’s also gotten into their heads off it.
It’s funny too, because the Wizards’ plan all along was to get inside LeBron’s head. Of course it didn’t work. Even when the Cavs have thugs like Deshawn Stevenson mug LeBron, he just keeps playing his game.
LeBron clearly can’t be fazed. The other night, Stevenson even punched him in the face while fouling him, and LeBron didn’t even realize the severity of the assault until afterward.
“I definitely saw DeShawn coming, but I didn’t know that he hit me with a closed fist until one of my teammates told me,” James said. “If we were on the park, something definitely would have escalated. If we was on the park where I grew up playing a lot of basketball, something would have happened. But I guess that’s what I want to do. They want to hurt LeBron James. It’s not going to work.”
LeBron has the self-discipline necessary to keep his eyes on the prize. The Wizards? They’d rather lose games and talk smack.
Brendan Haywood, who was himself thrown out of a game in the series for a flagrant 2, has gone after LeBron for being a crybaby. “Oooh, they’re trying to hurt me!” Haywood said, mocking LeBron in a baby-voice. Then he went off on a rant:
“C’mon man, this is the playoffs. He wears 23 and he wants to be Michael Jordan. I respect that because he’s a great player. But look what Mike went through. Mike got fouled way worse than this. You know what I’m saying? Nobody is trying to hurt him. Everybody is trying to play basketball, trying to win, trying to play tough. Leave it alone.”
There’s playing tough and then there’s deliberately trying to hurt someone. James clearly thinks the Wiz are trying to injure him, and he told the refs as much after Haywood’s hard foul on him in game 2.
Haywood had this to say about LeBron’s in-game complaining:
“I don’t ever remember a player coming out and saying that another team is blatantly trying to hurt me but the game has changed a lot. Back in the day, you couldn’t have said that just because of the nature of the game with the Bad Boy Pistons, the Knicks…you would have been seen as flat-out soft. But that is how the game has changed. They are not about flagrant fouls or tough play. It’s all about fluid motion and scoring a lot of points so it’s different. When I was growing up, you never heard that. I never heard Magic say it. Or Mike. Or Larry [Bird].”
The unpleasantness is all very entertaining, but unfortunately for the Wiz, the mind-games have already proven ineffective. They will soon be gone from the playoffs, and will have the whole off-season to think of new, amusing insults.
Tags: Brendan Haywood, Cavaliers, Deshawn Stevenson, Knicks, Lebron James, Michael Jordan, Pistons, Wizards
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