Time to get a little caught up Golden State Warriors power forward “Mo Buckets” (Marreese Speights). He’s currently leading the league with 34.3 points per 48 minutes, just a hair above Kobe Bryant at 34.2 and the Warriors’ own Stephen Curry at 34.1. Clearly, Speights has a legitimate shot at this season’s NBA Sixth Man Of The Year Award.
Naturally, #DubNation has responded:
The storylines even reached a point where Speights got into a battle of words with Kendrick Perkins of the Oklahoma City Thunder:
“He thinks he’s a tough guy, but at the end of the day, his game is terrible,” Speights said of the Thunder reserve player. “He always has got something to say to me every time we play against each other.
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“Always getting me going, so shout-out to Perkins again, who made me get this good game.”
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Speights was 11 for 18 from the field…
Perkins later responded:
“It’s just getting caught up in the game,” Speights said. “Certain guys talk trash to you. And what happened last night and in my whole career, when somebody starts talking trash to me, it’s making me focus more and turns me up more. So it worked out good last night that they were trying to get in my head, but it turned out it was bad for them.”
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Meanwhile, Perkins responded to Speights’ contention that he was acting tough and that “his game is terrible.”
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“I just don’t understand some guys, especially like a guy his caliber — five or six-year player in the league, you been on six different teams,” Perkins told the Oklahoman. “You don’t really have no room to be talking about anyone.”
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Joked Perkins: “It’s his world, I’m just living in it. That’s my response to Marreese Speights.”
Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle:
“I just made sure I wasn’t taking out the frustration on myself,” he said. “I’m just getting ready and always being ready whenever my name was called. I’m never being down on myself, and I’m always cheering for my teammates. In the past, I would probably take it out on myself and be depressed. This time, I know that opportunity is always going to come, and I’m going to take advantage of it.”
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Speights is hesitant when he’s called to the middle of the Warriors’ locker room to host a postgame media scrum. He usually speaks in short, quiet sentences.
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His Twitter account shows a different, thoughtful sort. He tweets things like, “You’re not a failure until you stop trying. If you have no other testimony, you have this one: ‘I’m still here,’” and “Even the ‘bad’ days deserve the best of you.”
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“Mo has been huge for us,” center Andrew Bogut said. “He’s one of the most talented guys in this locker room. He’s very, very talented. He can shoot the ball so well. For him, I think it’s just about getting the feel…”
Monte Poole of CSN Bay Area:
“I sort of kept him on the bench for a lot of the preseason. We’ve been trying to develop our two young bigs, Festus and Kuz, and giving them every opportunity.
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“I knew Mo would stay ready cuz he’s a pro and we know what he can do, but the production he’s given us is remarkable, and he’s earned that backup role and he’s gonna play a lot for us. He should anyway.”
Speights told San Francisco Chronicle Ron Kroichik where his work ethic came from:
Speights needed to add core credits and improve his SAT score before he could attend college (he later spent two years at Florida). So his mom, Regina Glenn-Speights, sent her youngest child to a faraway prep school with an elite basketball program.
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Speights landed a scholarship to Hargrave, but he was not entirely prepared for the lifestyle. The wake-up horn sounded at 5:30 each morning, and students were expected to clean their bedrooms, dress in full uniform, walk down six flights of stairs in their barracks (in Speights’ case) and line up in formation by 6.
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If cadets didn’t follow the rules, or committed another misstep such as showing up late for class, the punishment often involved marching around “the box” for an hour. That was a spray-painted square on the concrete courtyard, roughly the size of a half-court — and walking around it over and over proved especially draining on a hot day, in full uniform, shouldering a gun.
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Speights made the trip a few times and learned his lesson. He called his overall experience at Hargrave “humbling and crazy” and acknowledged that he probably wouldn’t be playing in the NBA without the discipline he picked up there.
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