CLEVELAND: After waiting 1,425 days to make another start in the NBA, DeAndre Liggins couldn’t wait any longer. He charged onto the court at Madison Square Garden for the opening tip against the New York Knicks earlier this month and took his rightful place alongside LeBron James and the rest of the Cavs starters.
There was only one problem: He forgot to take off his warm-up jersey. Liggins was at midcourt before he realized the gaffe, but it’s easy to see how he could trip over such trivial details. Given the road he has traveled, Liggins rightfully wondered whether he’d ever get a second chance in the NBA.
“This is enormous to me,” he said about an hour before the game against the Knicks. “I’m going to go out, compete, play hard and do what’s asked of me. But yeah, this is a big deal.”
Liggins was a spot starter that night because J.R. Smith was dealing with a sore knee. Now that Smith is expected to miss at least a month with a fractured right thumb, he is again the Cavs’ starting shooting guard for the foreseeable future. No one could’ve predicted that even six months ago, when he remained in basketball purgatory.
Liggins has lived in exile the past three years, punishment for heinous domestic violence allegations in August 2013 stemming from a dispute with the mother of his young son. Liggins’ ex-girlfriend, Jasmine Horton, told Oklahoma City police that he kicked in the bedroom door and pushed her down, dropped a fan on her, stomped on her and dropped an Xbox on her head — all in the presence of their 2-year-old.
Horton had bruising on her chest, scratches on her back and injuries to her arm and fingers, according to the Oklahoma City officer who wrote the affidavit. Weeks before he was set to attend training camp with the Oklahoma City Thunder, Liggins was instead arrested and charged with seven felonies including kidnapping and domestic assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. Within a week, he was released by the Thunder.
Liggins believes his original attorney compounded his problems. He said he wasn’t supposed to have any contact with his ex at the time, but his first attorney arranged for the two to meet. Liggins says when the prosecution found out about it, they piled on more charges. Shortly after, he fired his attorney.
When Horton refused to cooperate with prosecutors, however, the charges against Liggins and his friend, Marcus Rogers, who was also present at the time of the incident, were dismissed. Liggins’ second attorney, Tony Coleman, and Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater did not return calls to the Beacon Journal for this story.
Liggins pled guilty to one count of domestic abuse. He was ordered to make a $5,000 donation to a diversion program and he avoided any prison time.
“We’re better. We’re better people,” Liggins said of he and Horton. “We communicate. We co-parent. We talk. She still goes to counseling. I go to counseling. … We’re not together, but we communicate better and everything has worked out.”
Hard upbringing
Liggins is reserved, quiet. Every NBA locker room has cliques, but he typically keeps to himself. He speaks openly and freely about the case, but typically doesn’t say much before or after games.
He was raised on the gun-riddled streets of Chicago’s south side. His older brother and idol, Maurice Davis, was an 18-year-old star athlete who was shot to death outside of his high school.
Davis and some friends had confronted his sister’s ex-boyfriend, Xavier Edwards, one day after school because Edwards had shoved Davis’ sister when she broke off their relationship, according to a 2004 Chicago Tribune report. Edwards grabbed a gun and Davis tried to run away, but instead was shot in the back. Edwards was charged with second-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Liggins was 14 at the time. His brother died months after his father died after falling into a diabetic coma. But Liggins avoided the gangs and drugs surrounding him by focusing on basketball. He went to Kentucky and declared for the NBA following his junior year.
The Thunder was Liggins’ second organization in as many years. He was a second-round pick of the Orlando Magic in 2011 and released after his rookie year. Following his arrest, however, no other NBA team would touch him. Liggins signed with the Sioux Falls Skyforce — the Development League affiliate of the Miami Heat — as he worked through the legal process. He signed two 10-day contracts with the Heat and even appeared in their game on March 3, 2014.
He was released by the Heat on March 14 — a month after Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was arrested for assaulting his fiancée and two weeks before Rice was indicted. As the Rice incident swelled in the media and video footage of him striking his now-wife became public, Liggins couldn’t find another NBA team that wanted him. He believes it’s because of Rice.
“Ray Rice’s name is bigger than mine, so of course his thing was big. They looked at his thing and now domestic violence is a big issue,” Liggins said. “That kind of blackballed me.”
As the Cavs were marching toward the 2015 NBA Finals in James’ first year back in Cleveland, Liggins was dividing his season between Russia and Germany. He returned to the U.S. last season, but still couldn’t find an NBA team that would give him a chance. He instead went back to Sioux Falls and won a D-League championship and earned his second D-League Defensive Player of the Year award. Finally, in early August, Liggins found an NBA team willing to take a chance on him.
Taking a risk
The day before the Cavs played the Golden State Warriors in Game 7 of the NBA Finals last spring, Cavs coach Tyronn Lue and some other members of the organization (but no players) visited San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco. Lue has visited plenty of prisons around his home state of Missouri, but this was his first trip to San Quentin.
He walked the yard and talked to the prisoners, many of whom were big basketball fans and rooting for the Warriors. He played basketball with them on the prison court, ate in the meal room with them and walked past the place where Stanley “Tookie” Williams — who co-founded the Crips gang in the early 1970s — was executed in 2005.
The warden told Lue that 75 percent of those inmates at San Quentin would never commit another crime, but their convictions were for crimes so vicious they had to be locked up. Lue took that message into the Cavs’ locker room at Oracle Arena prior to their championship victory.
“Where we come from, the environments we come from, it could’ve been any one of us in prison,” Lue told his players prior to Game 7. “One bad night, one bad car ride, somebody got drugs on them, or one bad night and you get into a fight and someone dies, whatever. One bad night could change your whole life.
“Fortunately enough for Liggs, he got a second chance. Everybody makes mistakes. I think he paid for that mistake by guys not wanting to touch him and being in the D-League for three years. The talent he has, he should be up here on this level.”
A woman is assaulted or beaten every nine seconds in the United States, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. There are more than 10 million abuse victims annually.
Society has become more aware of assault cases involving athletes because of the footage of Rice’s punch and, more recently, Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon, who punched a woman in the face in 2014. Rice never received a second chance in the NFL, despite offering to donate his salary to domestic violence causes if a team signed him this year. No one took him up on it.
Footage of Mixon’s alleged assault was just released within the past few days. How that impacts his NFL future remains to be seen.
There was no video of Liggins’ alleged incident and it’s impossible to say how video might have changed his outcome. Regardless, Cavs General Manager David Griffin takes domestic charges seriously. He and his wife are actively involved with the Domestic Violence and Child Advocacy Center, which is why he vetted Liggins thoroughly before signing him.
Liggins displayed no pattern of this type of behavior. He wasn’t exposed to it as a childhood. It was viewed as an isolated incident — albeit a troubling incident. Griffin met with Liggins prior to July’s summer league and laid out steps Liggins had to meet in order to attend training camp. Liggins met them. He was early for every meeting with everyone involved. People neutral to the incident agreed it seemed isolated in nature.
Griffin learned that the league had set up counseling for Liggins. He met every month with an NBA-appointed counselor and met every week with another counselor in Sioux Falls. He remains in counseling through the NBA, which works around his hectic travel schedule. An NBA spokesman declined to disclose to the Beacon Journal the protocol involved in Liggins’ case.
“He spent three years paying for something that he didn’t have any legal obligation to pay for,” Griffin told the Beacon Journal. “So it was a fascinating situation. It’s a really unfortunate situation. I know he’s still friendly with the person involved and I know she told the league very positive things about him even though she had no vested interest in doing so. It’s a very sensitive subject for us. It’s something we cared a great deal about and DeAndre has lived up to everything he said he would to this point.”
Liggins is playing on a non-guaranteed contract. It only becomes guaranteed if he is still on the roster past Jan. 10. There is every indication he’ll remain in Cleveland all season, particularly now that he is starting in place of Smith.
Prior to that Dec. 7 night in the Garden, Liggins’ only other career start was on Jan. 13, 2013 with the Thunder. He scored 11 points and grabbed nine rebounds, then waited nearly four full years before starting another game.
Like everyone else in the league, Lue loves the way Liggins defends. He loves how Liggins isn’t afraid to pick up point guards full court, bumping them and poking them along the way.
Within the first couple of minutes of his start at the Garden, Knicks point guard Brandon Jennings dribbled between his legs while bringing the ball up the floor. Liggins, guarding him tight even in the backcourt, lost his balance and fell over as the crowd jeered. Liggins, however, did something he’s used to by now. He got right back up.
“My thing was to hold my head high and get through it,” Liggins said. “You’ve got to wait, you’ve got to believe in God. I believe everybody deserves a second chance in life. You live and you learn. I’m finally getting mine.”
Jason Lloyd can be reached at jlloyd@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Cavs blog at www.ohio.com/cavs. Follow him on Twitter www.twitter.com/JasonLloydABJ.