“Shooting” guard Sebastian Telfair was dropped by the Boston Celtics yesterday, four days after the Coney Island hoops legend was arrested on a gun charge – a move his lawyer compared to the skewering of the Duke lacrosse team.
The 13th pick in the 2004 NBA draft was stopped by Westchester police last Friday for speeding. When they searched the car, the cops found a loaded .45-caliber handgun.
Telfair pleaded not guilty to second-degree weapons possession and was released later in the day on $7,500 bail.
“The facts and circumstances of his case have not been determined, but he does not have a Celtics locker and we do not anticipate that he will,” said Celtic managing partner Wic Grousbeck yesterday.
Telfair’s attorney, Ed Hayes, said the Celtics were jumping the gun.
“It always bothers me when you punish a guy so severely before there’s been a finding of fact,” said Hayes.
“I think it’s wrong whether it happens in Durham [N.C.] or in Boston,” he said, referring to the Duke rape case.
Grousbeck did not say how the team would handle the remaining season on Telfair’s contract, which paid the Brooklyn-born 21-year-old just under $1.8 million for the 2006-07 campaign.
Telfair, who at 6-foot was the shortest player ever drafted straight out of high school, had a disappointing season with the Celtics. He started just 30 of the 78 games he played after being traded from the Portland Trail Blazers last June.
The Lincoln HS phenom averaged just six points a game and the Celtics finished at the bottom of the NBA’s Eastern Conference, with a worse record than even the Knicks.
Hayes said Telfair, who has nine brothers and sisters and grew up in the rough Coney Island projects, still supports 17 relatives on his NBA salary.
“He’s come so far and done so well,” said Hayes,” I don’t think you have to throw him overboard.”
Grousbeck said players have been explicitly warned to obey the team and league gun prohibition, as well as state laws.
Telfair and his pal Al Eden Fuentes, 28, were pulled over at about 4 a.m. on the Bronx River Parkway in Yonkers last Friday, when a Westchester cop clocked their 2006 Land Rover going 77 mph in a 45 mph zone, police said.
Telfair, who was driving, offered the cop an expired Florida driver’s license. Fuentes had been stripped of his license after being convicted in a fatal 2001 accident.
When the officer ordered both men out of the car, he spotted the gun under the driver’s seat.
Because neither Telfair nor his passenger claimed knowledge of the gun, both were booked for illegal possession.