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It's not always about basketball.
In the hours leading up to Saturday's games, three members of the Nets took time for some reflection on very different subjects. Thaddeus Young, whose mother died of breast cancer last year, was on hand at 9 a.m. Saturday for a 5K run he supported in his native Memphis. Thousands turned out for the event, arranged in cooperation with the Susan G. Komen Foundation. It's all part of his continuing "Thad for a Cure" project.
"I just wanted to raise awareness," said Young. "Brest cancer, and cancer in general, is a deadly harmful disease....
"I think of my mom all the time. I could tell you a million stories about how great of a woman she was, how much of an impact she’s had — not just on my life but in many other people’s lives."
Meanwhile, in another part of Memphis, Willie Reed and Chris McCullough, the Nets' two inactive players, toured the National Civil Rights Museum at the site of Martin Luther King's assassination. Among the exhibits the two visited were ones on the Freedom Riders, the 1960's voter registration drive, which featured a burned out Greyhound bus, and another on Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of the bus led to King's 1955 Montgomery bus boycott
The two were accompanied by Matt Riccardi, the Nets Senior Manager, Basketball Operations, and Kathryn Przybyla, the Nets coordinator for social media.
- Nets' Young at Breast Cancer Awareness race (Video) - Sarah Kustok - YES Network
- Reed and McCullough Visit National Civil Rights Museum (Gallery) - Brooklyn Nets