This is batsh*t crazy enough we gotta share it. You can accuse us of click bait or providing ESPN the very attention they crave when he utters this rubbish, and you might not even be that wrong. But we like to think of this as a public service announcement so that our readers can properly ignore — if they aren’t already — any and all reports emanating from the mouth of ESPN’s #HotTake Svengali, Stephen A. Smith.
On Friday, Smith waded back into the NBA free agency waters on ESPN 710’s Mason and Ireland radio show to report that there’s “a big possibility” Russell Westbrook will join Kevin Durant on the Lakers in the summer of 2017 — when Russ will be a free agent. Implicit in his comments is that KD will be signing with the Lakers this summer when he becomes a free agent. The LA Examiner was kind enough to transcribe Smith’s latest round of claptrap:
“Keep in mind this, one of the biggest reasons I’m told, that Kevin Durant may have the Lakers at the top of his list, is because the Lakers have been led to believe, by whom specifically I do not know, but the Lakers have been led to believe that it is a very good chance that the following year Russell Westbrook is coming.”
[…]
“It’s a big possibility. It’s a big possibility.”
[…]
“Make no doubt about it, Russell Westbrook doesn’t have a problem being in L.A.”
In case you forgot, Smith said Durant was going to the Lakers back in September. That was right before training camp kicked off and less than a month after he said KD might join Carmelo Anthony and Kobe Bryant in New York. At this point you wouldn’t be wrong if you thought Smith was just throwing darts at a big map of NBA cities and superstars.
But that Lakers rumor was enough to make Kevin Durant fire back and call Smith a liar, which in turn led to this peculiar moment — even by First Take standards — when Smith pretty clearly threatened the 2014 NBA MVP on air.
It’s obvious we’re dealing with a man who continues to exhibit an almost superhuman prescience.
We could go on and explain why this latest bit of unsourced gossip is so ridiculous, but we’ve done that spiel before and our readers don’t need to be reminded why this man shouldn’t ever be taken seriously. Before we even finish writing this post, there’s a good chance he’s already tied some other superstar to another city without a single verifiable source to back up his claims. To call this reporting is an insult to those NBA reporters who really do report the news, but we wanna make sure to call him out on this stuff, so there’s a clear record of his unsubstantiated claims. To say this latest one is baseless would just be belaboring the point further.
(Mason and Ireland; H/T LA Examiner)
