© Cary Edmondson | 2019 Jun 13
Former Warriors center Andrew Bogut hopped on with Tolbert, Krueger & Brooks on Tuesday and gave a behind the scenes look at one of the more bizarre Warriors stories in recent memory. On March 27, 2019, Jordan Bell, then a second-year player, was suspended for one-game for conduct detrimental to the team after he reportedly charged a candle to Mike Brown’s hotel room at the Peabody in Memphis.
The specifics beyond that were never revealed, as Steve Kerr, Brown and Bell all declined to elaborate on what happened publicly. Bogut was happy to retell the hilarious tale from his perspective.
“I just got there and like a week later the Jordan Bell thing happened,” Bogut said on KNBR. “We’re in Memphis, and usually when you’re on the road if you get room service or put something on your room, you just pay for it upon checkout. This hotel had a rule where if you didn’t have a credit card on file, you had to pay for it on the spot.
“So Jordan Bell goes into the gift shop. I don’t know what the hell he bought, some candles, some peanuts, just a bunch of random shit, right. Decides ‘I’m going to sign this off to Mike Brown.’ He gets signed off and as soon as he leaves they call Mike Brown’s room like literally five minutes later like, ‘Sir you need to come back down because we don’t have a credit card on file, you need to pay for that.’ He’s like ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, I’ve been in my room for the last hour.’
“So he goes downstairs and gets the receipt. Jordan Bell had originally signed the receipt in his name and he scrubbed out the name and then signed Mike. So then Mike’s like ‘Clearly someone forged my name, that’s not my signature.’
“It got bad man. So they got CCTV footage because Mike’s like ‘I’m not paying for this, there’s no chance in hell.’ So they get the CCTV footage, and you see Jordan Bell walking in there. And Jordan Bell’s like ‘Nah it wasn’t me,’ and they’re like ‘We have you on camera’ and he’s like ‘Oh yeah it was, but I was just playing a prank.’
“They take it seriously, right. Then he throws Klay under the bus, ‘Yeah this is a prank that a bunch of us do, like Klay was always doing it to me, always signing his internet and his inter-room movies to my rooms. So I just thought it was a thing we did on the team.’ Then Klay’s sitting there like ‘Dude, what the F man I have nothing to do with this.’
“It finished up with him not having so much of a funny story where he got suspended for a game, but it was funny because no one knew what he purchased, so everyone on the internet thought that Jordan Bell ordered a porno film and put it on Mike’s room. So then Jordan Bell had to put out a statement to his agent saying I did not order a porno. This poor kid dug himself a massive hole and just kept digging it further and further and further until he subsequently got suspended for a game.”
Already under an extreme microscope going for their third straight NBA title, the Warriors actually preferred not to suspend Bell and keep the incident in house. Social media had other plans.
“The funnier part is we’re in a team meeting right, and this is when all the KD-Draymond stuff had just happened. A few guys are like ‘Look, let’s keep this in house because we don’t want any extra attention from the media.’ And while we’re in the meeting, Jonnie West is like ‘Someone just broke it on the Twitter.’ So then we’re like I guess the decisions made, and he ended up getting suspended.”
Listen to the full interview below.