Doing preseason coverage on NBA TV is not the most glamorous job in sports television, but it’s also usually a pretty low stakes environment. That changed on Friday night though, when former NBA coach Sam Mitchell had a bit of a meltdown after host Chris Miles made a little joke about his salary on the desk.
After Mitchell lamented that coaches don’t get gold medals for the Olympics, Miles joked that he thought coaches should do their work on NBA TV pro bono. It seemed like a pretty innocuous joke, but Mitchell did not find that funny…at all. He proceeded to go at Miles for the next 90 seconds, calling him out for having a rental beach house in Florida along with a townhouse in Atlanta, and threatened to read out his address on air since he’s “not home right now” while Miles desperately tried to shift attention to the Warriors-Kings preseason game.
One of the most awkward sequences you'll ever see on live TV. While filling time before the Kings/Warriors tip-off, Sam Mitchell does not take kindly to being the butt of a joke related to his NBAtv salary and doesn't hold back 👀👀pic.twitter.com/9gVNdHBnK7
— Hot Hand Theory (@HotHandTheory) October 12, 2024
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mitchell said. “Did you rent your beach house out, down in Florida, during the hurricane? Or do I need to go on. How ’bout your townhouse?”
“You wanna call me out,” Mitchell continued. “I mean, come on. You screaming broke and hungry. Let’s just see it. You know, I know what you have and where you live, young fella. So you need to stop.”
Later on in the show, Mitchell actually read off the address to Miles’ rental property (watch here). NBA TV in early October isn’t usually this wild or tense, but clearly something odd was going on here between Miles and Mitchell and the former head coach lost his cool and had a bit of an on-air crash out. We’ll have to wait and see if Mitchell is back on the NBA TV airwaves any time soon.
