Stephen Silas tells @SportsMT about âblatant untruthâ by Brian Windhorst: âStuff like that is hard to take back. Itâs just not good reporting. He said he was sick to his stomach.â #Rockets
Midday Tuesday, Stephen Silas and the Rockets went viral for an unfortunate reason. In a story by ESPNâs Brian Windhorst regarding rookie Jabari Smith Jr., Windhorst shared the following anecdote to illustrate the environment in Houston:
At one point, (Stephen) Silas broke down in tears after a game because he felt he couldnât reach his players.
Windhorstâs intention was to show that Smithâs delayed breakout â the No. 3 overall draft pick from the NBAâs 2022 first round had largely struggled until after Februaryâs All-Star break â was perhaps due in part to a challenging overall landscape with the Rockets.
However, when the Silas anecdote was aggregated by third-party accounts on social media, many fans cited it as an example of a head coach struggling to connect with players on his team. In other words, that would be a failure at one of his most basic job responsibilities.
There was just one problem, though. The anecdote Windhorst referenced about Silas was more than two years old, and thus irrelevant to the 2022-23 Rockets. Moreover, Silas contends that the crying aspect wasnât even true, at the time. A correction was later issued by Windhorst and the story updated, but significant damage had already been done to Silas and the team, at least by perception.
On Wednesday, in an interview with flagship radio station SportsTalk 790 in Houston, Silas attempted to set the record straight.
Hereâs a portion of what Silas told Matt Thomas, who also works as the teamâs radio play-by-play broadcaster:
One of the things that came out of this article about Jabari and his improvement was this piece of misinformation that he put in. He basically said that I got emotional and broke down crying because I wasnât connecting with the players, which couldnât be further from the truth. Itâs a really disappointing thing to read and to hear about. I spoke to Brian yesterday, and he said he misremembered, or whatever.
There was a press conference my first year, where we had lost a bunch of games in a row (20), and I was emotional after the press conference. But I wasnât crying or anything. Then, he was talking about the press conference this year where I was mad about our defense, or whatever. He just said he messed up, and there wasnât anything he could really do to fix it. He said he was sick to his stomach that it was put in the article. He said he was going to tweet and try to fix it.
But what I told him, and whatâs true… is that stuff like that is hard to take back. Once itâs out, you canât just have a tweet, and everythingâs good. Itâs just not good reporting on his part. I have a relationship with him. I was quoted in the Jabari article. He wanted to ask me about it, I told him whatever he was saying was false and incorrect. It was a day of phone calls and stuff that I didnât really want to deal with. Thatâs the bare bones of it. Itâs just disappointing that he would write something like that, and Iâm the target of it, after a rough year.
For that blatant untruth to be in the conversation is disappointing. It was supposed to be about Jabari. I donât want it to be about me, at all. I never want it to be about me. It is what it is.
âIf you ask any of the players if I have a good relationship with them or not, each guy would be like, âWe love Coach.â Thatâs one of the things Iâm proud of,â Silas said of his relationships in the Houston locker room. âThere have been areas of improvement. Thereâs been things when we get it all together, itâll look pretty good.â
The complete interview can be listened to below.
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