NBA big man Montrezl Harrell alleges that he told Paul George he was going to knock him the “f— out” back in the bubble when the two were teammates on the Los Angeles Clippers.
“Alright, with that in mind…. I told P right then and there, in front of coaches and everybody, ‘I will knock you the f— out, bro,'” Harrell wrote. “‘You’re trippin’. You was wrong, bro. You’re WRONG.'”
Harrell sat out the entirety of the 2023-24 season with an ACL injury. He most recently played in 57 regular-season games and two playoff games with the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2022-23 campaign.
Back in the 2019-20 campaign, Harrell was one of the NBA’s most productive bench players. He started just two of the 63 games he appeared in during the regular season, yet averaged 18.6 points, 7.1 rebounds, 1.7 assists, 0.6 steals and 1.1 blocks per game.
Harrell’s gaudy numbers off the Los Angeles bench earned him the only Sixth Man of the Year award of his career to this point.
However, the 30-year-old’s production took a major dip in the 2020 NBA Playoffs compared to the regular season. Harrell saw his scoring average nearly get cut in half, as he averaged just 10.5 points per game on 57.3 percent shooting from the field across 13 playoff games with the squad.
He didn’t average a high number of rebounds per game in the playoffs either, as he pulled down just 2.9 per contest, which was less than half of his regular-season average.
George also didn’t play at the top of his game during the Clippers’ stint in the 2020 NBA Playoffs. While he did average 20.2 points per game for Los Angeles, he shot just 39.8 percent from the field and 33.3 percent from 3-point range.
The underwhelming play that the Clippers received from George and Harrell played a part in the team’s disappointing second-round exit. The Clippers held a 3-1 lead over the Denver Nuggets at one point in the second-round series but went on to lose Games 5, 6 and 7.
In the deciding Game 7, George had a hard time finding the bottom of the net when his team needed him the most. He finished with just 10 points while shooting 4-of-16 from the floor and 2-of-11 from deep in a game the Clippers lost by 15 points.
