[ProudGrandpaParticipant]

A happy 29th birthday to Antoine Wright! The 6’7″ wing player played 297 NBA games from 2005-2001 for the Nets, Mavricks, Raptors, and Kings. He averaged 5.3 PPG and 2.4 RPG for his career. After a good three-year career at Texas A&M, where he averaged 15 PPG and earned an All-Big 12 selection (the first and one of the last Aggies to ever do so), he was drafted 15th by the Nets. He spent 2 and a half years there and appeared in 17 playoff games, before being traded to the Mavericks, an afterthought in the Jason Kidd-Keith Van Horn trade that also gave Ryan Anderson’s draft pick to Nets. He spent two years in Dallas, scoring a career-high 7.3 PPG in 2008-2009 before being traded ot the Raptors in a massive, 4-team, 8-player trade that involved Hedo Turkoglu (Magic to Raptors). After a year there and 7 games with the Kings in 2009-2010, Wright lost his spot in the NBA and has since bounced around from the D-League (where he averaged 17 PPG) to China, Spain, and Venezuela. LAst season, he averaged 15 points for his Venezuelan team on…0% shooting? (Dang foreign basketball websites!!)

[CynthiaParticipant]

Antoine’s Mom is a more interesting story. She asked Mario Elie to take a picture with her and Mario declined. Later Antoine in front of his whole team called out Mario…he was shortly after blacklisted from the NBA.

Source: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/sam_amick/06/15/antoine.wright/index.html

Funny quote:

“I had an issue with one of the coaches and my mother,” said Wright, who was with the then-Mavericks assistant Elie and Kings coach Paul Westphal in Dallas from 2008-09 as a key reserve. “Mario Elie. I’ll say his name because I had a history with him. We had just lost a game. It was over the holiday, Thanksgiving holiday, and my mother was in town and in the [team] family room [at Power Balance Pavilion in Sacramento]. She came up to Mario Elie, and said, ‘I’m Antoine Wright’s mom. Can I have a picture with you?’ My mom is a fan of the game, a big fan of Mario Elie, and he said, ‘No, I’m with my family.’

“We’re a team now, so I came into practice [the next day] and told everybody, I said, ‘When we go into film, I’m just going to put Mario on blast.’ So I walk in last, and I come in through the front and Mario is in the back, and I said, ‘Man, you know what? That’s foul what you did to my mom. All she wanted was a picture. Everybody in this room would have took a picture with your mom if she asked, or anybody else’s mom in this room. That’s probably why we don’t have any team chemistry.’

“The next day [Kings officials] came in and were like, ‘Uh, this is not really working for you. It’s not working for us. No hard feelings. We wish you the best.’ I said, ‘Thanks for the opportunity, and I’m gone.’ ”

A picture of Wright trying to hit-on LeBron, but ‘Bron was having none:

I’m not really sure what’s going on here, and I don’t think I want to know:

[Author]

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