BASKETBALL LEGEND: Nick Harrison called Stephen Curry by the wrong name during a Nike meeting when Nike was trying to sign Curry to a new shoe deal.
Nico Harrison is obviously in the news these days as the Dallas Mavericks General Manager who made the shocking decision to trade his 25-year-old star player, five-time first team All-NBA player, Luka Dončić (notably, Dončić will not make it six years in a row, as he is now ineligible to be named to the All-NBA team due to the NBA’s recent “you must play X amount of games to be eligible for postseason awards and honors” rule).
Because of that, a lot of people are latching on to a story that happened to Harrison when he was at Nike, where he was the Vice President of North American basketball operations for almost twenty years before being hired away to be the Mavericks’ GM.
In an infamous story, Stephen Curry chose not to remain with Nike, and instead take a deal with the upstart company, Under Armour, and as the story goes, one of the reasons why was because during Nike’s pitch to Curry, they reused an old Kevin Durant Powerpoint, AND someone called him Steph-ON, while his name is pronounced Steph-EN.
Harrison has always denied it was HIM, but his DENIAL has led to a whole OTHER legend, that while he didn’t call him Steph-ON, he DID call him Seth, the name of Curry’s brother. Here’s DraftKings talking about it…
I’ve even seen it on Harrison’s Wikipedia page, and it is clearly wrong, and just a horrible misunderstanding of what his point was when denying that he got the pronunciation wrong (he acknowledged that someone at the meeting DID get it wrong):
“There is an article out. And the article says I mispronounced his name. It wasn’t me. It absolutely wasn’t me. But they didn’t know the other person, they knew me. So, they say I mispronounced his name because it’s sexy. But I’m like, first of all, I’ve known this guy forever, like since he was in high school. I used to represent his dad. How am I going to mispronounce his name? I might have called him Seth, but I wasn’t going to mispronounce his name. So yeah, Nike made a mistake. In all honesty, if he would have stayed with Nike, his business would be a monster right now. A monster.”
What Harrison is CLEARLY saying is that he knew the Curry family so well, due to his connection to Dell Curry from back in the day, that he would NEVER get Stephen’s pronunciation wrong. He could have POSSIBLY seen himself calling him by his brother’s name by mistake, since Harrison knew Seth, as well, but he would have never have mistakenly mispronounced his name. In other words, he offered up a theoretical mistake he COULD have made due to knowing the Curry family do well, that if someone had said he had done THAT, he could maybe believe it, but not that he would mispronounce the name of a guy he knew since he was a high school player.
That was, for some reason, translated into “I called him Seth.”
You can criticize the trade he just made, but don’t be putting this silly extra stuff on the guy.
The legend is…
STATUS: I’m Going With False
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