Stephen A Smith calls Noah Lyles ignorant for his NBA comment

Lyles is a little corny but he is GREAT for the sport

The world championships in basketball is the Olympics. Like WC in other sports, cycling and track and field come to mind, the athletes compete for their country against other countries rather than a trade team against other trade teams.

You guys just are not going to get it. Everything is not about race, but when you are a black male, in a predominately black sport (sprints) and you piss off other black people in a predominately black sport, you get a name attached to you that you really don't want. Noah thinks he's a baller now and NEWSFLAH, he isn't. He doesn't have the swag like Bolt, he doesn't have the attitude and credibility of Sha'Carri, he's just an anime geek trying to pretend like he's hard and he's getting dragged as he should. You guys live in your let's run bubble, but other much larger and much more active track & fields social media groups are appropriately educating him.

There actually is a Basketball World Cup that crowns the best national team in the world (and currently that would be Spain, not the USA).

The U.S. has won five of the 18 iterations, and has won 12 total medals. Yugoslavia has also won it five times (10 total medals).

Is the NBA the best league in the world? Sure.

Does it have the best players from around the world represented? Also yes.

But is the NBA Champion the World Champion? No. Not as we would recognize it in comparison to Track and Field (where the champion of the event put on by the sport's governing body is the World Champion).

Calling the NBA Champs the "World Champions" would be exactly like calling the Diamond League Champion the "World Champion." It's just not true.

Gotta be honest not too worried about what sprinters and basketball players think or say, All I care about is performance, that really is all that actually matters. It's just sports,

Some things are just understood, one is this World Champion thing, we all get it doesn't need to be explained.

We;ll hear a tv announcer say.......best running back in the nation.....talking about some cat at Alabama or USC, he knows we all know he's talking the NCAA, he doesn't need to explain that,

In the video he's using "they" because he thinks it will make him sound more "ethnic." He doesn't exactly present like Fred Kerley, so he's trying to "blacken it up" a bit.

Yeah, I know, DOWNVOTES, but it's still true!

Exactly. NATIONAL basketball association. Not international. Not world.
There is a FIBA World Cup.. and no one cares about it. It’s going on now.

Yeah. It’s frankly staggering (and highly amusing) that there are Americans pushing back on Noah’s point. In fact, they’re inadvertently proving his point.

You mean stephen who gives a fukc bigot piece of sh!+? Yeah. totally care.

Noah Lyles's point was to grab a lot more attention for him and track and field at the same time by trolling them into a loud conversation about whether track's athletes have a higher level of competition to win their world championships, which they do. So, this was mission accomplished on his part. And he was right, which is nice.

Actually, there's nothing comparable in basketball, which is fine, because it's a team sport and track and field above everything else on the elite level is an individual sport that gets even more interesting because of the, in this case, harmless nationalistic dimension. Noah Lyles has proven that he is the best sprinter in the world, bar none, in 2023, and that is the kind of individual accolade that basketball players don't really get (NBA MVP is the closest thing, but still is a team award).

But the target audience is not the one receiving the message. I swear you all have no multidimensional thinking skills at all. All he did was piss off people who he needs as allies. No one else cares. This doesn't bring any attention to track, it brings negative attention to him and him alone. I'd love to hear how you think this is going to grow the sport? Lyles got ahead of himself. No one cares about his World Championship and they think it's a joke and that he is too with his "they be" this and "they be" that. He doesn't speak that way and yet there he is trying to sound cool? Hard? More black? I don't know, but it doesn't land well with a lot of people. HUGE fail on his part, except on Let's Run of course!

I can't comment on his use of language, just on the point that the NBA champ is no world champ.

Noah is correct that you cannot become a world champion in track without being basically the fastest person in the world at your distance.

There are hundreds of guys walking around with NBA championship rings who probably were not among the 200 best players in the world the year that they won it. Are you telling me that Ish Smith should be a more celebrated athlete than Lyles, Knighton, or Tobogo? GTFOH

Professional bloviator bloviates because that's how he earns money. And in this case, he bloviates all the way out in lane 9 because he's so far out of his comfort zone that he doesn't even know there's no lane 9. I can't blame him for that (much), but I'm not going to take him seriously.

this is a clown conversation. Obviously Noah is correct in a literal sense that this is not a world championship. So they are making up a bunch of reasons why it's 'like' a world championship and then saying he's dumb for not agreeing with them about their redefinition of 'world championship'.

Welcome to LetsRun, my fellow traveler.

Stephen A on Luka Doncic before Draft:

"I dont give a d*mn about that European Kid Luka Doncic "

Beautiful troll move by Noah. He got ESPN and SAS talking about track and his 100/200 double. Noah is right on technicality, but it’s still a dumb take. NFL would’ve been better for the point he’s making.

The structures of the sport are different. International basketball is an afterthought because it doesn’t have much weight (if any) on the players pay. So, the best players in the world are focusing on an NBA title. In track, the WC and Olympics are structured as the peak of the season and how you perform has weight on your contract. Where do the best athletes in the world meet, at peak fitness? The NBA playoffs and the track and field world championships. Everyone is getting caught up on countries of teams when we should be looking at country of player.