Blake Griffin: Defending LeBron James

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One thing impressing me in a major way about Blake Griffin -- off the court -- is his willingness to speak out about certain topics.

Having said that, he doesn’t run off in weird directions or rip away.

(Griffin, of course, could have done so regarding Andre Miller and didn’t.)

But you can tell when Griffin has done a lot of thinking about a person or an issue. And that emerged Tuesday after Clipper practice.

Most of the talk was about the upcoming Clipper-Heat game, which is Wednesday night at Staples Center. At the end of our chat with Griffin, I asked him if he had ever tweeted about LeBron James, noting that James had tweeted about Griffin on Thanksgiving.

Griffin remembered he tweeted about The Decision and asked his followers what they thought about James leaving Cleveland.

“I think I said it’s crazy that somebody, people can be so upset over where a human being decides where he wants to play basketball,” Griffin said. “I thought it was crazy.”

He was just getting warmed up.

“I’m sure he would tell you that if he could do it all again, he might have done it a different way,” Griffin said. “But I don’t think he would have picked a different team or anything like that. There’s nothing wrong with what he wanted to do. It was unbelievable to me how much he was ridiculed for just wanting to go to a different team.”

It was noted that James had been in Cleveland for seven years before leaving for Miami.

That brought an interesting analogy from the thoughtful Griffin.

“It’s like somebody giving you money and taking care of you, giving you a home and then after seven years, ‘You’re like OK, you’re on your own now.’ And you being like, ‘What? You’re going to leave me?’

“They should be thankful for having him for seven years. And they shouldn’t look at it like from a standpoint of … a standpoint of betrayal.

“If you flip the situation, you think about the team and you think about some of the guys, the minimum-wage guys. The guys that aren’t the marquee guys. A team would cut them in a heartbeat without thinking twice about it. That’s the business side of basketball.

“You can’t be mad at a guy when he wants to take care of himself.”

-- Lisa Dillman