Ryen Russillo started his Dec. 16 podcast off with a rant about how ridiculous our reactions to pro athletes saying anything interesting is. His chief example was how everyone reacted to Micah Parsons’s comments about Jalen Hurts on The VonCast with Von Miller, but he used a Rudy Gobert-Malik Beasley example to drive home his point.
Russillo’s premise is that we overreact to what athletes say because they overreact to everything. “Nobody gets more irrationally mad than pro athletes,” said Russillo. “Nobody gets more excited to be mad about something that happened than pro athletes.”
Baseball players can’t pimp home runs. “They get so mad about everything,” he said, “you’re like, ‘What was the parenting situation with you guys.’”
Zion Williamson put an exclamation point on the New Orleans Pelicans’ 126-117 win over the Phoenix Suns, and it caused a brawl. “You would have thought he…DM’d another guy’s wife,” said Russillo, “and then screen-grabbed it and shared it with everybody.”
But Russillo saved the best for last, highlighting how Malik Beasley’s reaction to Rudy Gobert’s last-second basket in his return to Utah made it a bigger deal than it should be.
This is an absurd one. Rudy Gobert, back in Utah – tribute video, aww. Malik Beasley, now on the Jazz as part of that trade, he hit a three in front of the Timberwolves bench, shook his ass, where then D’Angelo Russell just sort of shoved him away.
Gobert, on the other end, at the end of the game sorta dunks, and then Beasley’s like, ‘He disrespected the game.’
So this is what we’re dealing with here. We’re dealing with a collection of guys, where as much as I love it all, and talk about them nonstop, I’ve made a living for 20 years talking about these dudes, but I can’t help but laugh. You guys love getting pissed off at the dumbest shit ever.
Gobert’s layup was all over ESPN the next day. Beasley’s ass-shaking? Nowhere to be found. We overreact to stuff athletes say all the time, and that’s why they usually don’t say anything interesting. But Russillo is right, athletes also overreact to stuff all the time, too.
The lesson in all of this? Everybody needs to chill out.
