LeBron James isn’t the only one who seems to have an issue with how Stephen A. Smith has been talking about Bronny James.
In a long diatribe on his show, “The Stephen A. Smith Show,” the sports media personality said Draymond Green was one of the athletes who have stopped talking to him “primarily because of this, I suppose.”
“When I think about somebody like Draymond Green, and I’ve kept my mouth shut about this for a while, but without getting into too many details, Draymond Green has felt the need to go to other people to say how he feels about me,” Smith said during the latest edition of his show. “And, I got mad love for Draymond. Draymond is a good brother that, quite frankly, I’ve always tried to be good to. And this shift in his feelings about me — I got it. But I’m gonna get to a bigger level. You see, one of the reasons that I had so many great relationships in the world of sports over the years is because if cats had a problem, they called me.
“Silly me, I’m thinking that if you get along with people and you talk with them, if they have an issue with you, at least they’d call you and confront you man-to-man before something’s resolved.”
Smith has not been shy about speaking on a number of different topics, including LeBron James and his son.
James confronted Smith during last week’s game between the Lakers and the Knicks, with video of the exchange going viral online.
Smith has been critical of James’ decisions around his oldest son as Bronny has struggled during his brief stint with the Lakers.
“I am pleading with LeBron James as a father: stop this. Stop this,” Smith said on Jan. 29’s edition of “First Take” on ESPN. “We all know that Bronny James is in the NBA because of his dad.”
During the show, Smith said that he and James “don’t really f–k with each other,” which is why he was focusing on talking about his situation with Green.
“It’s primarily been ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ for more than a decade — and I’m fine with it, and so is he, OK?” he said about James before returning to the beef Green has with Smith. “But that wasn’t the relationship with me and Draymond. That wasn’t the relationship with me and quite a few cats. And one of the biggest reasons that I loved the kind of relationship that we had, is that I always got the impression, ‘Yo, if they got an issue with you, they’ll call you.’ You talk it out as men and if you disagree, you part ways, even if you part ways not speaking with one another, or you can be agreeable, or you can agree to disagree.”
Smith bemoaned how the thing between Green and himself caught him off guard, but summed up things by saying, “It is what it is, you know?”
Green found himself feeling the anger of basketball fans last week after he insinuated that Karl-Anthony Towns didn’t play in a recent game between the Warriors and Knicks because he didn’t want to play against Jimmy Butler.
Towns later revealed that he missed the game to attend the funeral of a close family friend.
