Blake Griffin says one early run-in with a sports psychologist was enough to end that chapter of his career for good.
On the Friends Keep Secrets podcast, Griffin opened up about meeting with a team sports psychologist around 2012, when the Clippers had brought one in and required players to sit down with him. What started as a routine check-in turned into a trust-breaking moment Griffin says he never forgot.
“Yeah, I do,” Griffin said. “I didn’t most of my career, but I have like pretty consistently lately.”
Before getting to that point, though, Griffin described the experience that soured him on the idea entirely. He said the psychologist suggested they meet away from the facility, even offering to come to his house. Griffin agreed, and the two talked on his balcony in Manhattan Beach.
Then came the call.
Griffin said he went inside to shower, plugged in his phone, and later found a voicemail from the psychologist. In that message, Griffin recalled, the therapist told someone: “Hey, coach just left Blake’s house.
We had a good talk. Some really interesting things.”
Griffin’s reaction was immediate.
“First of all, I can’t believe he fed up that bad, because that’s really fed up. And second of all, I was like, ‘Well, f*** that. I’m never seeing another sports psychologist ever again.”
For Griffin, the issue wasn’t just awkwardness - it was confidentiality. The whole point of that kind of conversation is supposed to be trust, and he felt that was blown up almost instantly.
The timing makes the situation even worse. Griffin said the voicemail came right after the meeting, which makes it hard not to wonder whether the disclosure had been passed along on purpose. In 2012, the Clippers’ head coach was Vinny Del Negro, and Griffin’s story also puts Del Negro in a bad light if he had asked for details from the session.
Griffin never went back to a sports psychologist, but he has leaned on therapy more recently. He said he did not do it much during his playing career, but he has been going pretty consistently lately.
That shift fits the arc of the back half of his NBA career, when injuries began piling up and the physical toll became harder to ignore. Griffin had already talked about therapy publicly in 2018, telling CJ McCollum, via Rod Beard, “I have gone and seen a therapist before - just to sit and talk,” Griffin said. “What a lot of people don’t realize about therapy is they’re not giving you answers; they’re helping you find those answers.”
The former No. 1 overall pick in the 2009 NBA Draft missed the entire 2009-10 season because of injury, then exploded once he finally got on the floor. He won Rookie of the Year and made the All-Star team in 2011.
Griffin made four more All-Star teams with the Clippers, but injuries eventually changed the trajectory. He still had stretches of high-level play after that, though the decline was coming. He earned one more All-Star nod with the Detroit Pistons in 2019, his last great season.
Griffin retired in 2024 at age 35 after 14 seasons in the NBA.
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