Rudy Gay Started A ‘Friday’ Themed Twitter Beef After ESPN Ranked Him No. 70

Athletes complaining about their ESPN and Sports Illustrated player rankings is a popular pastime this time of year. And thanks to the ubiquity of meme worship in the social media sphere, folks have gotten creative – or as creative as you can get when lazily co-opting a pop culture reference – when expressing their incredulous disbelief.

“Bye, Felicia” is a throwaway moment from the 1995 classic Friday that has somewhat inexplicably found new life online over the years and was even meta-resurrected in the new Straight Outta Compton biopic. It’s become a sort of shorthand for expressing dismissiveness or contempt toward an individual or a situation. It gets deployed (overzealously, some might argue) for any number of scenarios and sometimes lands better than others, depending on how clever you are.

That’s a lesson Rudy Gay learned the hard way when he responded to dropping 12 spots to No. 70 on ESPN’s NBA Rank.

Granted, it’s a funny and mostly lighthearted reaction, but Gay apparently forgot that the movie Friday is packed to the gills with meme-worthy moments, many of which could be used as ammo to fire back at him, which is precisely what ESPN did.

Decide for yourself whether this type of behavior is unbecoming for a prestigious media outlet like the Worldwide Leader In Sports, and while you’re doing that we’ll be checking to see if Friday is still available on Netflix instant play for when we get off work.