Subscribe
Follow Us
When the Golden State Warriors take on the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday night, it will mark the first meeting between the teams since their matchup in the Western Conference Finals.
This will also elicit much attention from the Spurs' fans in attendance at the A&T Center to direct boos at veteran center Zaza Pachulia for his previous actions that caused Kawhi Leonard to suffer what was turned out to be a season-ending ankle injury.
In spite of that, Pachulia told Mark Medina of the Mercury News that he won't be affected by the boos thrown his way on Thursday.
“You’ll hear boos,” Pachulia said after practice on Wednesday. “But I don’t care.”
“After the closeout, maybe I was too close to him. But it was stupid when people said that it was on purpose,” Pachulia said. “There’s no way you can work on that and think about it. In the playoffs in the Conference Finals? Are you kidding me? This is such a game of quick decisions, so quick. How the hell are you going to plan that?”
Pachulia also noted that he has sustained much worse treatment from fans in his past while playing for Galatasary in the Turkish League during the NBA lockout back in 2011.
“Booing is nothing compared to that,” Pachulia said. “They were throwing things on the court and waiting outside of the buss and throwing stones at the bus. It was crazy. It’s dangerous.”
It won't mark the first time that he has heard that as he dealt with that in the final two games of the four-game sweep of the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals. The disdain from the fanbase runs deep given that it may have changed the course of the series.
San Antonio had been in command of Game 1 holding a comfortable 20-point lead in the contest prior to the injury. Following that, Golden State caught steam toward a major comeback that set the stage for the rest of the series.
Ultimately, it's something that Pachulia is going to have to deal with the rest of his career whenever he plays at the A&T Center.
