Every year, some folks on Jimmy Kimmel‘s staff comb through Twitter to find a bunch of mean tweets about NBA players, broadcasters, and more. Then, Kimmel gets said NBA personalities together, puts them in a room, turns on a camera, and has them read the mean things that random folks on the internet said about them.
The schtick has gone on for a few years, and you’d think by now it would have lost its luster. But as we learned during the fifth edition of NBA Mean Tweets, the gag is as funny as ever.
The first heavy hitter was easily Clippers big man DeAndre Jordan, who has been on Mean Tweets a few times and always seems to take it in stride. That was the case this year, as he read a joke about his struggles from the free throw line and laughed them off.
Joel Embiid made a cameo, and like most things related to Embiid, he had fun with the bit and kept a stone face while reading off the joke.
Magic Johnson pretended to get mad at someone for saying he’s stupid, but on the inside, you know he was laughing because his net worth is way, way higher than the person who wrote an inflammatory tweet about him.
James Harden got a beard joke. It was admittedly a pretty good one, although that may be because jokes about his struggles during the Rockets’ blowout loss against the Spurs that knocked them out of the playoffs have gotten kinda tired.
The winner of the entire thing, though, was Karl Malone. Because Malone has never taken crap from anyone in his life, he got the phone, read the tweet, and decided it wasn’t worth giving the person who insulted him the pleasure of reading what they had to say.
It’s hard to “win” Mean Tweets, but if you can, Malone was the winner this year. We’ll see if he defends his title the next time we get an NBA edition of Kimmel’s signature segment.
