Comments from Lance Stephenson about whether he wanted to be physical with Dwyane Wade during the Eastern Conference finals made it seem like the Pacers guard wanted to injure his Miami Heat counterpart, but that’s not at all the case.
Stephenson was moved to apologize/clarify his remarks after his original comments were taken out of context, making him look bad.
According to Pacers.com writer Scott Agness, Stephenson was asked Saturday “do you want to be as physical as you can with Dwyane Wade or whoever else you’re matched up against?”
Here was his response via the Indy Star:
“D Wade, I think his knee is kind of messed up, so I have to be extra aggressive, make him run,” Stephenson said. “Tell coach to run ‘floppy,’ make him running around, make his knee flare up or something. Do anything as much as possible; make the games come easily for us.”
Totally reasonable response, right? Doesn’t at all make it seem like he has malicious intent … just a strategic move to take advantage of a situation.
The problem is when outlets start chopping up the quote, it makes it sound much worse. For example, this account tweeted the following to their 165k followers:
Lance Stephenson on DWade: I think his knee is kind of messed up so I got to be extra aggressive and…make his knee flare up."
— NBA Legion (@MySportsLegion) May 17, 2014
All of a sudden Stephenson looks like a bad guy whose intent seems malicious when it’s not. That’s all because the “make him run” part of the quote was omitted.
As a result, Stephenson felt the need to tweet for the first time in nearly a month to clarify.
“They are the champs. They are the high water mark. We are here to beat them. We don’t try to hurt anyone but we are going to go after them and do all we can to beat the champs,” he wrote.
