To my knowledge, Pop may be irascible, but he still answers the question, put forth. Instead of "Kawhi is slowly coming back from injury, and we're monitoring his health, so his training regime has been meticulously modified and variable," you get "yep, he's getting there." I mean, it's not like Pop is dodging reporters or questions. He's still answer the question, just with less words. What ESPN is doing, is trying to start drama. ESPN should pride itself on being an unbiased news source for sports, rather than trying to get hot takes / deer-in-the-headlights responses like TMZ, or have an obvious bias towards one side, like Fox News.
This is what ALL news is becoming, sports being more like politics than 'news'. Who was the female CNN reporter who got banished after one of her interviews, and ended up on one of the off brand networks? She started an interesting discussion on what is the difference between the two...and the answer seemed to be perception only. Ie, they ALL chase and create drama, but the mainline networks try to maintain a visage of objectivity and 'hard' reporting, when such is NOT the case. Look at all the actual news scoops that TMZ and the like have had lately? Sports is even moreso. First, there simply isn't enough sports news to fill all the available timeslots. Second, what DOES fill the time slots is opinion and 'First Take' type shows. It has been shown time and time again that what generates clicks and viewers is generating (reporting on) controversy. This creates interest, and interest generates viewers. This is why we keep hearing about Lavar Ball, when you could sum up everything of any consequence he's said or done in maybe 1 5 minute segment (and maybe not that long). But he creates controversy, which generates interest, which generates viewers...so we keep hearing about him. As a poster in a different thread on Lavar pointed out...Lavar is totally aware of this, and using it to his advantage.
