The Lakers played their first game of the 2016-17 NBA season against the Rockets on Wednesday night, and even though Kobe Bryant is obviously no longer on the team, it was still a star-studded event with all kinds of celebrities showing up to take in the game at the Staples Center. The usual suspects, like Jack Nicholson and Denzel Washington, were in the building, and they sat alongside younger stars like Kendall Jenner, Nipsey Hussle, and YG.
On a normal night in Lakerland, the fact that a celeb like YG showed up to watch the Lakers wouldn’t be all that newsworthy. Even during the down years, there are always famous people at Laker games. But YG made some waves during his appearance at the game by rocking a James Harden jersey and getting into it with some hecklers who called him out for showing support for Houston instead of L.A.:
That prompted one Lakers reporter, Bill Oram of the Orange County Register, to crack a joke about YG on Twitter. Oram was apparently not familiar with YG before Googling him during the game and said so in a tweet:
Oram didn’t @ YG in his tweet, but before long, that tweet made its way back to YG while he was still sitting courtside. And he was more than happy to let Oram know that he was supporting Harden because of his ties to L.A. with this tweet:
Yikes. Fortunately, Oram didn’t take YG’s tweet to heart:
He even joked about the comma that YG forgot to include in his tweet with Jazz reporter Jody Genessy of the Deseret News:
And he also joked about successfully making it out of Staples Center after the game with Lakers reporter Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News and Rockets reporter Calvin Watkins of ESPN:
YG didn’t have anything else to say on the matter, but during the game, he did get up some shots with Harden at halftime:
And as we told you in our interview with Harden that was published on Wednesday just hours before the Rockets/Lakers game, the two also hung out in Houston recently during the release of Harden’s first signature adidas sneaker:
So if you were confused as to why YG was wearing a Harden jersey during a Lakers game in L.A., now you now.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering, YG was actually on the losing side when it came to the actual game last night. The Lakers got the post-Kobe era off to a good start by beating the Rockets 120-114.
