It hasn't been a good 24 hours for Skip Bayless. For years, he harped on the point that LeBron James was not mentally equipped to win an NBA championship, but then Thursday night happened. We were worried about him, wondering what he would do to respond.
Now, to make matters worse, Mark Cuban has thrown gasoline on Bayless' fire. The Dallas Mavericks' owner was a guest on ESPN's First Take, and he spent the entirety of his segment ripping apart Bayless and other media members for not doing their homework.
Some of the highlights:
- Cuban began his segment with this: "You guys like to talk in complete generalities, where nobody can question you. You don't ever use substance. You don't ever use facts."
- When Bayless said the Heat won because they played harder, Cuban responded by saying
"That is the most ridiculous thing any sportswriter has ever said."
- Cuban broke down the Mavericks' defensive strategy, saying, "We wanted him to play Michael Jordan, and make someone else be Steve Kerr."
- When Bayless said he knew "for a fact" that James knew what Bayless thought of him, Cuban responded perfectly. "This is a Skip Bayless special. 'He lost last year because he was paying attention to Skip Bayless. He won this year because he stopped paying attention to Skip Bayless.'"
But by far the best sequence was this one:
CUBAN: "How do you think we defended him? Why do you think he was standing out there?"
BAYLESS: "You didn't have to defend him."
CUBAN: "Oh, right. So no matter what we did, he was just going to stand there and do nothing."
BAYLESS: "Well, that's all I saw. Dwyane Wade saved the day for them."
CUBAN: "That's exactly right. That's all you saw. You didn't look. That's a complete insult to us."
That pretty much sums the whole segment up. Cuban's point is that many media members like Bayless don't do their homework on the actual games and instead spout nonsense. After watching this segment, it's hard to disagree.
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