“Big Shot Bob” relived his short stint with the Phoenix Suns on Nightcap with Shannon Sharpe and Chad Ochocinco and still couldn’t hide his disdain for his old rival and head coach.
“You know what the weird part was? Danny Ainge became the coach. Danny Ainge, I didn’t like him from the moment I got there,” the former Rockets, Lakers, and Spurs forward said. “We just finished a tough series against Phoenix. You remember that inbound play where he rears back and hits Mario Elie in the face with the ball on point-blank range? Mario is my boy; me and Mario are close.”
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“When we walking down the hall and Danny Ainge said to Sam Cassell like, ‘You know I hit Mario with the ball in the face on purpose, right?’ He acting like it was a mistake. I’m like, ‘Man, f*** you. From that moment on, I never liked him,” added the seven-time champion.
“Towelgate”
Horry was traded to the Suns midway through the 1996–97 season, where Ainge was then an assistant coach. Ainge eventually took over from Cotton Fitzsimmons, but his relationship with Horry was volatile from the start. It all came to a head during a game against the Spurs when the BYU alum pulled Horry from the lineup, and Horry responded by hurling a towel squarely at his coach’s face.
Looking back, it was probably payback for what Danny did to Elie back in the 1994 postseason as much as the untimely substitution. Horry never forgot the cheap shot Ainge delivered to his teammate, and the tension clearly simmered long before that towel ever flew.
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That said, it could also be Robert’s way of getting out of Arizona since the Suns were far from a contender that season. He eventually found his way to the Lakers, where he won three more titles with Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant from 2000 to 2002.
“The last thing Danny Ainge said to me was after he said, ‘We’re trading you to LA for Cedric Ceballos and I probably just won you another championship.’ That’s what he said to me. That’s the last conversation I had with him. Don’t plan to talk to him, don’t wanna talk to him,” concluded Horry.
The one thing Horry loved when playing in Phoenix
With all that turmoil and tension between him and Ainge, playing with the Suns was not all that bad. The one positive the 1992 first-round pick mentioned was playing with a true point guard like Jason Kidd. J-Kidd came over from Dallas and showed Horry what it was like running with a floor general.
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“I only had a chance to play with Jason Kidd for two games while I was in Phoenix… I look at my career; I’ve never played with a true point guard for that one moment. You should have seen me hitting the lanes, getting layups, looking up, the ball was right where I wanted to catch. It goes to show you, when you got a point guard, he’s going to make it so much better,” Horry recalled.
“One moment” was a highly accurate statement. It wasn’t actually two, but one game where Horry and Kidd played together. The Mavericks traded “The Kidd” to the Suns on December 26, 1996; “Big Shot Rob” flew to LA on January 10, 1997. The only time the two suited up in Phoenix together was the December 28 contest against Vancouver. Kidd was sidelined after that and couldn’t play until mid-February.
As Robert remembered, he was in stride the whole game. He finished with 16 points, nine rebounds, and four assists, while the San Francisco native dropped nine dimes and grabbed seven rebounds in 19 minutes of action. That said, it was against a lowly Grizzlies team, so it probably didn’t mean much.
For all the drama, Horry’s time in Phoenix was short but memorable, for the wrong reasons with Ainge and a what-could-have-been moment with Kidd. Still, it was a brief stop that led him right to his next ring.