NBA teams
Mike Mazzeo, ESPN Staff Writer 8y

Jarrett Jack says 'Haha' tweet was never about Jeremy Lin

NEW YORK -- Jarrett Jack says he was not throwing any shade on Jeremy Lin on July 1 when he tweeted in laughter about 20 minutes after Lin tweeted he was signing with the Brooklyn Nets.

Some wondered whether Jack might have been bitter considering the Nets waived him and then gave Lin a three-year, $36 million contract.

But Jack, who inked a one-year, veteran-minimum deal with the Atlanta Hawks, says his tweet had nothing to do with Lin.

“I haven’t reached out to J-Lin, but hopefully he doesn’t think it was (any bitterness on my part),” Jack said at his NYC summer basketball camp Friday. “What would even be funny about that? I think J-Lin is damn good. I thought he was tremendous in Houston when they were hitting all those 3-pointers, and then in Charlotte, he played his ass off during the playoffs.

“I’ll talk to him when I see him, but I don’t think it’s important to be calling and saying, 'You know, I didn’t mean anything by it.' We kind of know each other so to speak, and hopefully he knows me to the degree where I’m not sitting around and tweeting ‘hahaha's’ at someone else’s expense.”

Before sending out the tweet, Jack said he was in Houston working out with former NBA coach John Lucas II, his son, John Lucas III, and New Orleans Pelicans guard Tim Frazier. Jack arrived to the workout a few minutes late, and when he walked into the gym, everyone was laughing.

Jack eventually found out Frazier was mad about something -- although Jack wouldn’t say what it was -- and everyone was making fun of Frazier because of it in a good-natured way. An hour and a half into the workout, Jack said Frazier got even angrier and wanted to leave, which caused others to laugh and joke around with him. At that point, the players decided to end the workout and head to Lucas II’s house to hang out.

As they walked to their cars to leave, Jack, who has sent out tweets based on his mood in the past without any context, decided to fire off the tweet because he found Frazier’s anger so funny.

Jack didn’t think anything of it, but soon he received a call from his brother telling him he had created a social media firestorm.

Jack was perplexed by the reaction.

“Clearly the Nets and I had parted ways, so they would’ve had to sign somebody,” Jack said. “So let’s just say they were to sign Mike Conley and I tweeted, ‘Hahaha.’ Would there have been an uproar? The one thing they told us as far as Twitter is always be specific. But people were calling me a racist and all sorts of stuff, and I was like, 'Are you guys really believing this? This is crazy.'”

Jack tried a bit to clarify things on Twitter, but Frazier did him no favors when Jack asked Frazier, who he had been joking around with, to have his back.

“My thing was you can’t put out every fire, and I’m not even going to try to,” Jack said.

Now about seven months removed from ACL surgery, Jack believes he is probably a month away from returning to full-contact workouts with other players.

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