Stephen Jackson Has Some Great Stories About Weed and Don Nelson

Stephen Jackson played 14 seasons in the NBA with the Pacers, Spurs, and Warriors (among several others) and judging from his recent appearance on a podcast with actor Michael Rapaport, it sounds like he had a really good time while doing it. Jackson appeared on I Am Rapaport and divulged some stories about smoking weed before games and the supremely chilled out approach of Don Nelson, his coach with the Warriors from 2007 to 2009.

First, let's get to Don Nelson. It sounds like he had a great relationship with Jackson and point guard Baron Davis, and in addition to slamming bottles of 12-year-old scotch together, Nelson was extremely excitable about his players' ability to smoke weed.

Nobody knows this story, so this is the first time somebody is hearing this. We're in Utah and the drug test people are around, you know, to get our last drug test so we can smoke, right? Don Nelson, we talked about weed all the time, he was cool with talking about weed. We got our last test in Utah, right? So me and Baron are coming out the locker room just screaming, excited with our last pink slip saying we could smoke for the rest of the season and Don Nelson hauls ass down there giving us hi-fives like, "yeah, we can smoke now!" It was cool, the fact that he knows what's going on off the court with his players, which was great man. We enjoyed it. That's why we were a great team.

That's a pretty good story. Also that is a 2009 picture above, just to have an idea of what Don Nelson "haul[ing] ass" might have looked like.

Jackson opened up a little bit more about his own pro-weed position, and extended to pre-game routines.

I can't speak for nobody else. Me personally, I've done a lot of shit before games sometimes and still was able to go out there and be productive. I just gotta be real, you know, it's been a couple games where I smoked before games and had great games. It's been some games where I smoked before the game and was on the bench after three minutes sitting on the sideline, 'please calm down, this high has to calm down,' I done shot three shots that went over the backboard, like, I'm going to be honest, like 'ahh, I gotta calm down.'

He also opened the show absolutely hammering Phil Jackson for his ineptitude with the Knicks, passing off the triangle offense as his own invention, and generally making life terrible for Carmelo Anthony. He also said "Phil" in a really snotty way, like, 25 times. Which was fun.