Dear DeAndre Jordan,
First off, congrats on finally deciding to rejoin the Los Angeles Clippers for the foreseeable future. I think you made the right choice to return to a team that was a game away from the Conference Finals. Now, the Clippers can keep their nucleus of talent intact, and Lob City can reign once more in the Staples Center.
A lot of people have taken offense to the way you’ve handled yourself in the last week. They’ve called you a coward, they’ve called you a traitor, and they’ve said that you owe the whole NBA an apology. You, DeAndre Jordan, do not need to apologize to anyone. It is your right to make yourself happy, and in the business world, that should be the only driving force behind all of your decisions. If you felt that Dallas was not where you wanted to be, then good for you for making an intelligent, and completely understood, change of heart. Mr. Jordan, you should not be penalized or criticized for doing what is best for you and your inner circle. If your agent isn’t on board 100% with what you want to do, then just dump him. You, and your agent, are going to get paid either way, so why not be happy?
Mr. Jordan, you don’t need to call Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. In fact, Cuban should blame himself. In the free agent “moratorium”, negotiations may be had, but official contracts are not allowed to be signed. While I understand that you did not sign a contract in that time, Cuban and his team of professional recruiters schmoozed you to the point where you felt that you couldn’t say no.
The Mavericks essentially burned themselves by unfairly luring you into a false sense of comfort and once you awoke from that lucid state, you realized where your heart truly is. Some are using you, Mr. Jordan, as an example of why the moratorium should be terminated. However, your case just shows that NBA front shouldn’t get their hopes up, and shouldn’t toe the line that much during the first week of July. They need to remember that the pawns they are playing with are people who are capable of making their own decision, like you, and for that, they should stay in their lanes and distance themselves slightly from free agents during this moratorium. I don’t care that Mark Cuban was looking all over the Houston area for you, he essentially did it to himself.
Besides the business elements of your busy week, you created bay far the most entertaining social media buzz this year. You got JJ Redick, Chandler Parsons, Chris Paul, and even Kobe Bryant to engage in a Twitter war that left bystanders in stitches and kept us waiting for more. It is not often that someone can create such a national stir while staying mum the whole time. You just did what you needed to do, and let everyone else do the publicity, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
What’s more important than the Twitter fracas was the fact that you kept sports fans everywhere busy during an otherwise boring week. Other than your decision, Mr. Jordan, the biggest topic of discussion was an often-injured defensive end for the Giants injuring his hand in a fireworks accident (idiot). Don’t even get me started on how good this is for the NBA, how it will make things more interesting during the season, blah, blah, blah… Anyway, I don’t think that we, as a sports community, could seriously take the NBA Summer League or the MLB All-Star Game as the big topic of the summer for much longer. So thank you for giving us the opportunity to cash in our opinions and for diverting us from 4 hour baseball games.
My final word to you, Mr. Jordan, is simple. Don’t listen to what other players have to say about what you did, especially certain Mavericks (attention: Chandler Parsons). They may say that you’re not ready to lead a team, or that you’re not man enough to be a franchise player, but none of that will matter in the Summer of 2016 after you survived a deadly Western Conference and made it all the way to the NBA Finals. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even be hoisting the Finals trophy after picking apart a poor Eastern Conference team in 5 games. If I were you, I wouldn’t have moved either, solely because the Clippers are stacked (more so than the Mavericks). Good luck to you, Mr. Jordan. I wish you the best.
Sincerely,
Dylan Hornik
The Underdog 