NBA players have perhaps the most social-media friendly position of any athletes in sports. It comes with the nature of their game. Football players hide behind helmets and pads. Baseball players only bat three or four times per game. Hockey players come on and off of the ice so frequently that they remain relatively anonymous. But NBA teams have only five players on the court at a time, and they have no protection. Fans get to see who they are every time they step on the court, and so players have become very active on social media in order to try to control their own images.
For the most part, that creates a very fun bond between players and fans. But occasionally, it leads to some very angry and bitter fans using social media to throw out insults ranging from genuinely mean to utterly hilarious. And nobody does a better job of finding those insults than Jimmy Kimmel Live. The show has a segment called Mean Tweets that has celebrities reading mean tweets about them, but the best versions of the segment are the NBA-specific versions. Another one was released on Thursday with the NBA Finals beginning, and it might have been the best one yet.
Some of the highlights include:
- Jalen Rose's head being compared to a lego man, which isn't exactly inaccurate.
- Tracy McGrady being compared to Steve Urkel, which isn't quite as apt, but to be fair, he is wearing glasses in the segment.
- Andre Drummond's free throw shooting being insulted, which doesn't even really make sense any more as Drummond got his free throw percentage up to a career-high 60.5 percent this season.
- Stephen A. Smith being called the human caps lock, which is perhaps the most appropriate sentence that has ever been uttered.
- Kevin Love being blamed for no reason, which is perhaps the most tired NBA trope in recent memory.
But the highlight of the video by far comes at the end, when Kobe Bryant reads the following tweet: "Kobe looks like he cries to can I get a Kiss From a Rose by Seal." Bryant sees this as an opportunity to show off his musical side, and we even get a bit of singing from the future Hall of Fame shooting guard.
Overall these insults are all read in good fun. The original tweeters of course meant them as insults, but they are so funny and over the top that they can hardly be taken seriously. Players enjoy reading them, and they are among the funniest bits of NBA-related content produced today.
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