The annual festival of basketball called the NBA Finals is ongoing, which means that a lot of mainstream media is going to be giving the NBA a lot of attention. An annual staple around Finals time is the NBA featuring itself on major talk shows through innovative segments that bring more casual fans to watch the live games.
The one guaranteed way the league has been doing this is by featuring a bunch of players on the show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, which sees multiple NBA players read out mean tweets that the show organizers have picked for them to read.
This year’s cast of characters is pretty stacked, featuring a lot of All-Stars, All-Stars, and season award winners. Anthony Edwards, Russell Westbrook, Franz Wagner, Jalen Suggs, Darius Garland, Jarrett Allen, Zach LaVine, Gary Payton, and Jalen Green, among many other NBA players, were on this video reading out mean tweets about themselves.
NEW @NBA #MeanTweets! pic.twitter.com/q3Eeija3Pk
— Jimmy Kimmel Live (@JimmyKimmelLive) June 14, 2022
Many of the players took jokes against them in good humor. Andre Drummond and Jalen Green in particular started laughing out loud when they read what was said against them. However, Gary Payton did not like being compared to Kanye West even slightly. Anthony Edwards lay into a spelling mistake in the mean tweet against him, even following up after the episode was released.
These jokes are relatively tame, as anyone who has seen what goes on in NBA Twitter knows. Westbrook was on the video reading a tweet mocking his fashion sense when we all know that fans have been mocking him in other ways this season.
Despite all of that, these are really fun videos that humanize the players. While there are bells and whistles attached for it to air on national television, it is fun for casual fans as well as hardcore fans to just enjoy some basketball content.
