NBA - Main

Source: https://www.si.com/nba/2023/11/16/dillon-brooks-villain-rockets-daily-cover

Brooks wants to clarify something. The criticism did bother him. For a while, anyway. Days after the Grizzlies’ season ended, Brooks tumbled down a social media rabbit hole. He read the comments on Instagram. On X, formerly known as Twitter, he scrolled through the replies. He saw everything. Machine Gun Kelly dropping his name in a freestyle (“Come back like LeBron and drop 40 on you like I should”). James, quoting Jay-Z lyrics, dissing him. (“Unlike you little I’m a grown ass man.”) Anonymous followers burying him. “LA Fitness Draymond,” one wrote. “Tired wrestling heel,” posted another. Suggestions that Brooks’s next stop would be in China briefly had the Shanghai Sharks trending. “That’s when I realized how big the Lakers were, how big LeBron James is,” says Brooks. He shrugs. “It’s part of my life. It’s going to make me a better player.”

Brooks hoped Memphis would support him. Instead, the franchise cut him loose. At a season-ending press conference, Grizzlies GM Zach Kleiman declined to address Brooks’s future. Days later, The Athletic reported the team informed Brooks he wouldn’t be back “under any circumstances.” In March, Memphis coach Taylor Jenkins had called Brooks the player who “epitomizes” the program. By May, that program wanted him gone. “What I didn’t like about Memphis was they allowed that so they can get out of the woodwork, and then I’m the scapegoat of it all,” says Brooks. “That’s what I didn’t appreciate. And then ultimately they’ll come to me on the low, as men, one on one and tell me something, but then not defend me when everything went down.”

In Houston, team officials watched with interest. For months, the Rockets had studied Brooks. They needed defenders. The Grizzlies finished in the top six in efficiency in each of the last three seasons, with Brooks regularly guarding opposing teams’ top perimeter players. They needed veterans. Winning veterans, preferably. Memphis made the playoffs in each of the last three seasons. The swagger, the confidence, the attitude? Houston, with win totals in recent years that looked like locker combinations, desired that, too. “Fundamentally, we want the player we saw in Memphis,” says Rockets GM Rafael Stone. “The aggression, the competitiveness, the willingness to do whatever it takes. That’s what’s attractive to us.”