LeBron James Denies Report That He Is "Tempted To Beat Kyrie's Ass"

LeBron James, who is always eager to use social media to swat away unwanted narratives, took aim at two SLAM Magazine tweets this morning. If we’re going to unbox this Russian nesting doll of tweets and aggregation, might as well start with the James tweets themselves. He’s boooooooing in both.

First he booed a SLAM blog post, which was in turn aggregating a Cleveland.com story that contained the following quote: “[Derrick Rose is] also looking at a potential starting spot in the same lineup with LeBron James, now that Irving has asked for a trade and James is eager to see him off.” That quote, even if from a reliable source, obviously casts James in an ugly light. And the King’s magic worked. The SLAM story has since updated its headline to account for LeBron’s denial.

Then he booed a different SLAM blog post, which contains an embedded Twitter video of Stephen A. Smith crowing on ESPN and quoting a source who said “LeBron James would be tempted to beat [Kyrie Irving’s] ass.” Here, again, James got his way and the headline was updated to this wonderful, misleading one, which implies the existence of a previous report that James had beaten up his sidekick.

We hope you enjoyed this dumb case study in how LeBron James passive-aggressively massages The Narrative. In other news, he’s excited about his new teammate.