It may have only happened once, but Bill Simmons noticed.
The popular former longtime Worldwide Leader writer, who left the network acrimoniously, was part of a story that ESPN wanted to feature — and he was, quite obviously, not featured.
On Wednesday, “Get Up!” aired footage of Adam Silver speaking last weekend at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The clip zoomed in on the NBA commissioner, completely obscuring the person he was speaking with.
“They should have just replaced me with a hologram of Rachel Nichols,” Simmons wrote on Twitter.
ESPN disagrees. In a statement, the network disputed that Simmons was left out intentionally, pointing to the fact Simmons’ face appeared when “The Jump” ran the video. ESPN contends different editing strategies and not petty grievances are to blame.
”This is a non-story,” an ESPN spokesman said. “There is absolutely nothing to this. We ran clips of Adam Silver with Bill Simmons on ESPN shows/platforms.”
Simmons has appeared on the Worldwide Leader recently, once as a guest on Katie Nolan’s show in October.
The bad blood between Simmons, who’s now with HBO and runs The Ringer, and ESPN stems back to 2015, when the network announced Simmons would be let go. He had fought with ESPN publicly several times during his tenure, the biggest fight coming in 2014, when Simmons was suspended for calling Roger Goodell a “liar” during the Ray Rice video saga.
The most-read sports writer ever and the biggest outlet split, instantly becoming enemies, Simmons now helping create sports documentaries for HBO, a competitor for the “30 for 30” series he once helped develop.
