Heat star Jimmy Butler’s agent, Bernie Lee, has taken a shot at the NBA media cycle and named NBA insider Shams Charania as the ringleader.
Lee recently recalled a moment from the 2021 season, where Shams was reporting on social media about tensions between Miami and Jimmy.
“Lee thought the report, which centered on Butler being demanding, was misleading — ‘Jimmy’s hard on people? No s—!’ — and took to Twitter himself to respond,” Intelligencer‘s Reeves Wiedeman wrote. ‘Shut the f*ck up you click bait, ambulance chasing, dirt bag piece of sh*t,’ Lee wrote of Charania. ‘No one has told you this because this is not reality. Go find someone’s assistant to text abt an MRI or some other human calamity you want to be 1st on.’
“Lee told me he objected partly to the story itself but also to the media environment in general. ‘Players are experiencing the world through their phones and consuming this like everybody else, and because these guys are consuming nothing but garbage about themselves, I’m seeing guys be unable to have an accurate sense of themselves,’ Lee said. ‘It’s not solely Shams’s fault. He just happens to be a ringleader of a really sh*t circus.’”
Lee does have a point.
Social media and the NBA go hand in hand now, and not necessarily for the better.
Heartbreakingly, some players don’t even find out that they’ve been traded until Shams or ESPN‘s Adrian Wojnarowski report it on X.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve been at an NBA franchise your entire career, like Marcus Smart.
Smart spent his entire nine-year stint at Boston, only to find out he was being traded via his agent / social media.
“I was actually asleep, and my agent called my fiancée. She woke me up out of a sleep,” Smart told reporters in July after he was traded to the Grizzlies. “It was right after the deal had been made, and I think Shams had already tweeted it out. That’s how we found out.”