Since joining Undisputed this summer, Richard Sherman has stepped in it multiple times with his NBA commentary. But on Wednesday, he spent several minutes unleashing on Denver Nuggets head coach Michael Malone, of all people.
“Michael Malone will be an irrelevant, erroneous name in the history books of the NBA,” Sherman said. “As people will forget about this Denver Nuggets championship team.”
Sherman seemingly did all this in defense of LeBron James, whose Lakers team was swept by Denver in the NBA postseason last spring.
“You’re sitting here talking about, ‘we got LeBron James, we got him at 39,'” Sherman said. “The difference between Mike Malone and LeBron James is no one will ever forget LeBron James played the game of basketball or how he played it.”
“Nobody will be talking about Mike Malone after this year. We won’t be talking about Mike Malone after this show.”
Richard Sherman really has it out for Nuggets head coach Michael Malone — a reigning NBA champion with more than 400 wins on his resume across 11 seasons as a head coach in the league: pic.twitter.com/Lp0CbVWPng
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 4, 2023
Even though Fox producers try to make it easy on NFL specialists by limiting NBA talk almost solely to Lakers analysis, Sherman couldn’t help himself but enrage NBA fans.
Seeing Sherman take the anti-trash talk angle here is a surprise too. He was a notorious instigator and fiery competitor. Malone wasn’t the only member of the Nuggets talking himself up after the championship, after all. Plenty of players did so as well. And deservingly so, after sweeping the Lakers and losing only four total postseason games en route to a title.
If nothing else, Sherman set himself up here to talk about James and the Lakers even more. If nobody can challenge them and James’ age makes him bulletproof, then the Lakers are made men for Undisputed debates all year.
That’s next-level segment production that Skip Bayless can surely get behind.
