Stephen A. Smith Proves Kwame Brown's Point
In a steady stream of videos posted online, Kwame Brown has conveyed several important messages, including that Stephen A. Smith is not qualified to analyze basketball and that Smith has made a career out of personally attacking Brown.
Smith and his ESPN overlords decided that the best response to Brown is to give Smith over eight minutes to do voiceover narration of a selection of lowlights from Brown's career. During the narration, Smith repeatedly mispronounces Brown's first name. Smith is not intelligent or funny. He has demonstrated that he is a petty person who does not deserve a national platform to spread his ignorance and disrespect.
Brown last played in the NBA in 2013, so lowlights of his career are hardly newsworthy footage--and I am pretty sure that you could splice together a few minutes of lowlights from any player's career, including some of the greatest players of all-time (to cite just one example, Magic Johnson once dribbled out the clock in a tied game in the NBA Finals). There is no reason for ESPN to show Brown's lowlights other than to humiliate him. It is breathtaking that ESPN thought that this was a good idea.
Brown has posted a response video noting that it is easy to verify that the lowlights footage comes from games during which Brown was limited by various injuries, but that is not even the main point--though it does show how disingenuous Smith and ESPN are. The main point is that one of the NBA's primary media partners ran an eight minute video to mock a retired player. This is not Shaqtin' A Fool, Shaquille O'Neal's lighthearted clips of active players (and O'Neal often makes fun of himself as well); this is a video designed to prove that Brown was a bad player.
Who appointed Smith to determine that Kwame Brown must be mocked as a bad NBA player?
Smith's 15 minutes of fame have lasted a lot longer than they should have. Brown has exposed Smith as the fraud that intelligent observers of the NBA always knew him to be. It is well past time that ESPN reassign Smith to a role befitting his qualifications, as opposed to placing him front and center of the network's NBA coverage. The longer that Smith is on the air, the more that he embarrasses himself and his employers. I don't know how NBA Commissioner Adam Silver handles his business, but former Commissioner David Stern made a regular practice of contacting media organizations that portrayed the league in an unfair or disparaging manner. Silver should consider calling ESPN and asking the network to focus its coverage on the 2021 NBA playoffs, not a blooper reel of a retired player.
Labels: ESPN, Kwame Brown, Stephen A. Smith
posted by David Friedman @ 7:26 PM
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