Paul George is someone who does not sit in the good graces of Los Angeles Lakers fans. After over a year of rumors and speculation that the Palmdale native would come home to the purple and gold, PG-13 ultimately ended up on the Los Angeles Clippers instead.
George had a chance to come to the Lakers as well when his contract expired with the Oklahoma City Thunder. He decided to stay to play with Russell Westbrook only for that to blow up and George eventually get traded to the Clippers.
It is probably a good thing that the Lakers didn’t get George as his playoff resume is not the best and the Lakers actually got a championship out of it. But it does not change the fact that George is one of the fanbase’s favorite players to pick on.
And sometimes he just makes it way too easy. When discussing his time with the Indiana Pacers on his ‘Podcast P with Paul George‘ show, George dropped perhaps the most hilarious quote of the entire 2022-23 NBA season.
"“I genuinely feel as much as (Pacers fans) aren’t happy with how things went about, they boo me because, at the end of the day, it’s love. And I’ve still got love there. I hung banners there. I’ll always be grateful for the time that I was there.”"
Hung banners. That is not a typo, a misspelling, or even George misspeaking. “Playoff P” as he notoriously dubbed himself says that he hung banners in Indiana during his tenure with the team.
Lakers fans should get a massive kick out of Paul George saying he hung banners.
Just to be clear, the “banners” that George is referring to might be the Pacers winning the Central Division in 2013 and 2014 while he was with the team. So we are talking about divisional banners in the one American sport where divisions literally mean the least. Got it.
Or maybe George thought the team hung a banner for taking the Miami Heat to seven games in the 2013 Eastern Conference Championship? The classic “we were one game away from making our first NBA Finals since 2000” banner. Got it.
Now the question must be asked: what kind of banners is he going to leave for the Thunder and the Clippers? We now know that George loves hanging banners for winning the division, so he must be devastated that his teams have been unable to win their division since he left the Pacers.
This quote makes it even better that George did not come to the Lakers. If he did, he probably would be bragging about all of the banners that are already hanging in the arena and would take credit for those.
Or maybe he would have actually been bummed out when the Lakers didn’t hang a banner for winning the division because they have actual important things to hang banners for.