As ESPN cuts expert voices and rewards viral argument, fans who want to understand basketball are building a smarter conversation elsewhere<\/p>\n
After the Phoenix Suns dumped the Golden State Warriors out of last season\u2019s play-in, Stephen A Smith settled behind the First Take desk to explain why Steve Kerr might have coached his last game. Midway through the burial, he claimed<\/a> the Warriors hadn\u2019t \u201cbeen to the playoffs since that championship in 2022\u201d \u2013 a four-year drought in his telling \u2013 before grumbling that Golden State could pay someone far less than $17m a year to miss the postseason.<\/p>\n Cool. Except the drought never happened. Golden State reached the conference semi-finals in 2023 and again in 2025. ESPN anchor Shae Cornette, who had command of the basic facts, tried to smuggle that inconvenient reality into the discussion. It went nowhere. Apparently, nobody on an ESPN set is permitted to correct the franchise \u201cstar\u201d. Only weeks earlier, Smith had been inducted into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame<\/a> for his work in media.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As ESPN cuts expert voices and rewards viral argument, fans who want to understand basketball are building a smarter conversation elsewhere After the Phoenix Suns dumped the Golden State Warriors out of last season\u2019s play-in, Stephen A Smith settled behind the First Take desk to explain why Steve Kerr might have coached his last game. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}