Omri Casspi is the perfect example of Stockholm Syndrome in the NBA. He started his career with a Kings franchise that was just as hapless then as it is now. He enjoyed some measure of individual success, although he was randomly inserted into and removed from the starting lineup by Paul Westphal, and his teammates were all total garbage. I mean, I’m looking at the roster for the 09-10 Kings, and it is just a list of Euro-bound washouts and veritable cancers. Jon Brockman? Hilton Armstrong? Donte Greene? Sean May? Ime Udoka? Casspi was probably the fourth best player on the whole team after Kevin Martin, Carl Landry, and Tyreke Evans.
Casspi understandably wanted to escape from the abusive franchise which had drafted him, so he went to Cleveland, and later, Houston. Neither of those teams saw fit to play Casspi all that much, and tragically, it compelled Casspi to return to his first “love”, the first franchise to show him any attention at all, despite most of that attention being negative. Yes, Casspi crawled right back to the abusive situation that he had tried so hard to leave.
He is now, once again, putting up decent individual numbers while the team crumbles around him. Life is truly cyclical. I think I’m going to sell rights to this story to the Lifetime channel.