ESPN Zooms Way In On Adam Silver To Avoid Broadcasting Bill Simmons's Face

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and The Ringer CEO Bill Simmons had a surely scintillating discussion at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last weekend, where Silver said something mildly newsworthy and kind of bizarre about how players today are unhappy and anxious as “a direct product of social media.”

ESPN’s Get Up, the show that’s on your TV in the morning when you accidentally zonk out on the couch while watching west-coast basketball, talked about Silver’s comments with Charles Barkley today. The show played a clip from the Sloan conversation that hilariously managed to keep Simmons, who had an acrimonious exit from the network in 2015, completely out of frame. Unsurprisingly, Simmons had something to say about it:

Yeah, that’s Adam Silver appearing to talk to a man wearing an invisibility cloak, as Simmons appears only as a ghostly voice saying “yes,” because he’s totally cut out. Here’s a comparison, via Dan McQuade, of how the clip originally looked compared to how it looked on ESPN:

Simmons, who’s seemingly shit-talked the company nonstop before and since getting fired, isn’t banned from ESPN or anything—he was on Katie Nolan’s show last year. But this is a solidly enjoyable footnote in a long-running petty beef between two very wealthy and grating entities. In my Taylor Swift/Kanye West Pantheon Of Famous Feuds, I give this entry a 5.47 out of 23.