It’s been more than a month now since Derek Fishergot fired by the Knicks and, outside of showing up in a vacation photo alongside Gloria Govan’s family, he’s been quiet as of late. That ended today when he broke his silence by putting together a piece for The Cauldron and attempting to clear his name with regards to several issues.
At the beginning of the piece, which you can read here, Fisher talks about his final days with the Knicks and downplays all of the rumors suggesting that his personal life played a role in him losing his job. He says the Knicks made a basketball decision and that his personal life was never discussed in his last talk with the team.
“At no time did anyone at that meeting express to me that stories about my personal life were distracting from the collective task at hand, or—more important—that any of my players had expressed to management that they had lost confidence in me as their coach," he writes. "Nothing remotely like that was ever brought up or discussed.”
Without talking specifics, Fisher also writes about some of the rumors that he read about himself in the days after he got fired and calls them “outright lies." And then, he discusses the incident that took place between him and Matt Barnes last year.
According to Fisher, he was never all that close with Barnes off the basketball court, even when they were teammates from 2010 through 2012 with the Lakers. He also says that he wasn’t trying to hide his relationship with Barnes’ ex Govan in the months leading up to their now-infamous altercation. And he says that, while Barnes did show up at Govan's home last October with bad intentions in mind, there was no “fight” between the two men:
I don’t know what was going through Matt’s mind that day in October when he showed up unannounced at Gloria’s house, and started swinging. I didn’t retaliate. No one who was there did anything but try to get him to calm down, particularly because Matt and Gloria’s children were present. There was no fight.
Fisher also writes that he believes someone—we’ll let you decide who he’s talking about—is responsible for spreading the “fight” story:
The story of a “fight” leaked to the media. I’ll let you speculate on who leaked it and why, and the nature of their character. My reputation speaks for itself.
You can read Fisher’s entire account of the Barnes’ altercation here. We've now heard Barnes' side of the story, Fisher's side of the story, and even Gilbert Arenas' side of the story. So what's the real story? At this point, we'll probably never know.
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[via The Cauldron]
