Kentavious Caldwell-Pope’s New Philadelphia Home Shockingly Gets Struck By Lightning
· Yahoo Sports
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and his family have received an electrifying welcome to Philadelphia, but not the kind they’d hoped for. Kentavious’ wife, McKenzie Caldwell-Pope, recently revealed that lightning struck their new home in Philadelphia.
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“A little backstory, my husband played for the Grizzlies last year,” McKenzie said. “This year, he’s on the 76ers. So I had to meet the movers that packed up everything from Memphis and moved it to Philly. So I get here, I meet my moving coordinator, everything’s going smoothly. Literally, I’m here for maybe 30 minutes. Minutes after I signed the lease, you guys. I hear the loudest bang I’ve ever heard in my life.”
McKenzie, who married Kentavious in July 2016, was on the penthouse floor at the time, and all hell broke loose very quickly.
“All of a sudden, s*** starts shooting out of the ceiling and water is pouring in, dumping in,” McKenzie said. “So everyone just starts screaming, and we’re like, we have to get out of here. When I say it was coming, there was at least two, three inches of water in there before we even got out. We were like, we have to go. So we had to climb down 14 floors to get to safety.”
McKenzie claims no one believed her when she said lightning had struck. The front desk told her the sprinklers just got tripped, but she wasn’t buying it.
“It’s Niagara Falls,” McKenzie said. “That ain’t no sprinkler, girl. Like something bad just happened. Then we’re like, where are our movers? The movers are stuck on the elevators because the lightning has struck. The elevators are broken. They can’t get down. So the fire department comes. Like, what is going on? So then hours later, the electricians come. They’re like trying to fix everything.
“They turn off the sirens and all that,” McKenzie added. “And they say, you guys, after everyone was denying that I heard what I heard, why did the electrician say, yeah, you got struck by lightning and there’s a one in 400 million chance of a unit getting struck the way this unit got struck.”
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That is just insane. Fortunately, no one appears to have gotten hurt in any way.
This wasn’t the ideal start to life in a new city for the Caldwell-Popes, and they’d be hoping Kentavious’ time on the court with the Philadelphia 76ers starts better. The 33-year-old spent the 2025-26 campaign with the rebuilding Memphis Grizzlies and wasn’t quite at his best.
Kentavious averaged 8.4 points, 2.5 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 0.8 steals, and 0.2 blocks per game for the Grizzlies. He then picked up his $21.6 million player option for 2026-27 this offseason, but it was almost a guarantee he wasn’t ending the campaign in Memphis. The only question was whether he goes before it or during it.
Well, the Grizzlies agreed to a contract buyout with Kentavious, allowing him to join the 76ers on a one-year, $3.9 million deal. He is reuniting with his Los Angeles Lakers teammate LeBron James in Philadelphia, and they’re hoping to win another title together after their triumph in 2020.
Kentavious also explained his decision to sign with the 76ers by saying he just wanted to get back to playing meaningful basketball. He was seeking that playoff spotlight, and it will be interesting to see how he fares.