The Brooklyn Nets have their fair share of unknowns this year. They’ve got a bevy of new pieces, including a brand-new head coach and two future Hall of Fame forwards. They’re possibly the deepest team in the NBA and have a real shot at winning an NBA Championship, but they’ve also got pronounced, significant weaknesses.
But we’ve got an additional, unexpected unknown: Reggie Evans refuses to share with the public why he shaved his beard off.
Evans enjoyed a bit of popularity for his famously sharp, long look last season, so to see a clean-shaven face was a bit of a surprise. But while Evans won’t let us in on why he made the decision, he did drop a few context clues.
“I can’t really say why I cut my beard off because I don’t wan’t it to get back to a certain individual,” Evans said multiple times. “I don’t want to make him mad. … I got frustrated and pissed off ’cause something happened, so I just cut it off.”
Evans said he planned the timing of the shave so that it’d be back for the first game of the regular season, against the Cleveland Cavaliers on October 30th.
“Ain’t nothing bad or whatever but like I said, I don’t want that individual to find out, then (have) he call me, like ‘Aw, that’s messed up,'” Evans said with a laugh. “Things weren’t going in the proper manner and some things happened.”
Other than possibly losing a bet, I can’t fathom what might have happened that both pissed off Evans and would make a “certain individual” feel like Evans wronged him if he kept his beard.
We’ll see the beard again. Evans already has some stubble back, and when asked if he’d grow it back in full, he responded, “hell yeah.”
One thing Reggie Evans won’t keep a secret: his connection with Duck Dynasty. In an interview with SLAM Magazine, Brook Lopez casually mentioned that Evans introduced him to the stars from the A&E reality show.
Reality TV has a stigma for being, well, anti-real, but Evans dismisses that for the Duck Dynasty crew. “The way they is on TV, that’s how they is in person. … The way they were dressed on TV, that’s how they were dressed in person.”
I presumed Evans knew them from hunting in some random Florida backwoods, but the truth is as far from that as possible.
They met in November in — get this — Beverly Hills. While Evans was on a road trip with the team, he went out to eat with his wife at a restaurant where the Duck Dynasty crew happened to be eating.
After Evans got to chatting with Willie and their wives connected, Evans invited them out to the Lakers-Nets game. Evans played 19 minutes, grabbed 11 rebounds, didn’t attempt a shot, and flopped against Metta World Peace in a 95-90 Nets loss. Safe to say they saw Reggie Evans at his Reggiest.
