Dillon Brooks is doing everything in his power to become the NBA’s next villain.
The 27-year-old wing from Mississauga, Ontario has picked up so many technical fouls this season that he earned two one-game suspensions. He punched Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell in the groin, which started a brawl. He shoved a cameraman, which led to a fine. And in last year’s playoffs, he hit Gary Payton II while in the air, causing him to break his elbow.
And Brooks has been going back and forth with the NBA’s reigning irritant extraordinaire, Warriors forward Draymond Green, all season, with their beef spilling off the court into written features and podcast soliloquies.
Classic Dillon Brooks on his confrontation with LeBron James: “I don’t care. He’s old. … I poke bears. I don’t respect someone until he gives me 40.”
— Tim MacMahon (@espn_macmahon) April 20, 2023
And Brooks had plenty more to say. pic.twitter.com/uWLONrubPZ
But it all pales in comparison to calling the greatest player of this generation “old” and “tired” last week. Brooks added that LeBron James is “not at the same level that he was when he was on Cleveland winning championships, Miami … I poke bears. I don’t respect no one until they come and give me 40 [points].”
This prompted the Brooks ejection.
— LAKERFANATICS (@LAKERFANATICS) April 23, 2023
pic.twitter.com/wxPdIpPoFQ
James, of course, responded in typical James fashion, not by dropping 40 but by dismantling the Grizzlies in a 111-101 win on Saturday night, coming out with a 35-9 first quarter lead and personally finishing with 25-9-5. The performance caused enough frustration for Brooks, who shot 3-13 while acting as James’s primary defender, to get ejected in the third quarter for – and stop me if you have heard this one before – punching James in the groin. He says he was going for the ball, but unfortunately hit two.
Brooks is earning quite the reputation for himself in his sixth NBA season. With Grizzlies star Ja Morant in and out of the lineup due to injuries and a suspension and co-star Jaren Jackson Jr quietly going about his business with his best offensive season ever and the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year award to boot, Brooks took it upon himself to become the Grizzlies’ (over)emotional leader and on-court irritant.
And – apart from exceptions like James’s game on Saturday – it often works, with Brooks’ defensive antics getting under the skin of some of the best players in the world (with All-Stars shooting worse percentages against him than anyone in the league) and his post-game quotes becoming a regularly dissected topic on NBA talk shows and podcasts.
“I want them to be angry, off-kilter emotionally,” Brooks says about his pesky defense, which is what got him to the NBA and kept him there. “With some guys there’s fear, 100%. They don’t want to talk to me or even look at me.”
But he’s Canadian, you may think. Aren’t they supposed to be the nice ones? The truth is that Brooks is a pest not in spite of being a Canadian, but because of it. Growing up in Mississauga during an era where making it to the NBA from Canada was a tougher proposition, Brooks had no other choice but to find an edge.
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Mississauga is a hotbed of hoops talent. The densely populated suburb to the west of Toronto is made up of immigrant communities that settled in the Greater Toronto area looking for a better life. It’s the type of environment that breeds a tough mentality – one that has produced many talented athletes and basketball players including New York Knicks wing RJ Barrett, Atlanta Dream draftee Laeticia Amihere and, of course, Brooks.
Brooks grew up in northwest Mississauga, waking up at 6.30am every day and taking three buses to get to high school basketball powerhouse Father Henry Carr in Toronto. It was there, in the days before prep schools started plucking away the best talents, that Brooks formed his basketball identity alongside other Canadians such as Barrett, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, and Andrew Wiggins. Players who dreamed of making it to the NBA but lacked the role models to follow, with just eight Canadians in the NBA in 2012-13.
Brooks scrapped and clawed his way to relevance by competing in Greater Toronto gyms known for their focus brash competitiveness. Unlike the prep and AAU circuit that ball players grow up in these days, Toronto-based high school teams played each other several times a year, with the same players returning year-after-year to compete for school and neighborhood bragging rights. Trash talk was a huge part of the culture, and Brooks embraced it.
“I wouldn’t call [Brooks] a villain in high school, but he was that guy,” former Henry Carr varsity head coach Paul Melnik said. “You couldn’t watch us play and not take note of him. If you were a parent on the other team, you probably didn’t like it. He was giving it to you and your kid, and letting you know about it. Because there was one thing about Dillon: He always had a little more fire in his belly than anybody else.”
As good as he was in Canadian terms, establishing himself as one of his country’s top high school players and spending his final year at Findlay Prep near Las Vegas, Brooks was still just a four-star high school recruit whose best offer came from the University of Oregon. He spent three seasons there, becoming the Pac-12 Player of the Year while leading the Ducks to a Final Four appearance, before the Houston Rockets picked him late in the second round of the 2017 NBA draft, and immediately traded him to Memphis.
Brooks, like many Canadians at the time, was overlooked throughout his basketball journey. Growing up in the days before a record 23 of their countrymen played in the NBA and regularly made All-Star teams, Canadians felt like they had to work twice as hard just to get the same attention as American kids. And the ones like Brooks who were determined to make it to the NBA but lacked elite size, athleticism, or shooting were willing to do anything to find an edge. His way of doing that was by being a defensive-minded, trash-talking pest. It worked.
After surpassing any and all expectations in high school and college, he became a starter just eight games into his NBA career in Memphis, where he is the longest-tenured of the Grizzlies. He hasn’t looked back since.
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On Sunday, the NBA announced that no further penalty will come to Brooks for his actions despite having his track record of crossing the line. He will now be allowed to play in a crucial Game 4 against James and the Lakers on Monday. The decision stood in stark contrast to the NBA’s punishment of Warriors forward Draymond Green, who was suspended for Game 3 of his team’s series against the Sacramento Kings “based in part on Green’s history of unsportsmanlike acts” after stomping on Domas Sabonis’ chest.
Many fans and media members have wondered aloud why Green was suspended but not Brooks given the precedent set by the league, while others have asked all season why no one on the Grizzlies has told Brooks to relax and take more of a backseat role after shooting a career-low 40% from the field and 33% from three-point range while missing multiple games due to suspensions.
“The media making me a villain, the fans making me a villain and then that just creates a whole different persona on me,” Brooks said on Sunday. “So now you think I intended to hit LeBron James in the nuts. I’m playing basketball. I’m a basketball player. So if I intended – and that’s whatever is in the flagrant 2 category – if you think I did that, that means you think I’m that type of person.”
His statement is odd to say the least: many of Brooks’ antics this season have been downright unacceptable, from hitting James to shoving a cameraman. And when you walk that line between being a team-player and an irritant whose job is to lead with emotion and get under opponents’ skins – a job Brooks takes so seriously that he claims to only have only four or five friends in the NBA outside his team – it’s inevitable that you will step over that line once in a while as Green and Brooks have. Brooks is smart enough to know that: it’s jarring for him not to acknowledge it.
Indeed, Green went so far as to admit that “I’ll get suspended again at some point” after his ban against the Kings. And if Brooks was being honest, he would say the same thing. Because for NBA players, especially ones who made it out of Canada, flipping that competitive switch off is a lot easier said than done.
