‘Steph vs. Sabrina’ deserved better than Kenny Smith

Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post

Kenny Smith’s comments were lazy, loaded with misogyny, and ruined an iconic event.

Everything about the three-point contest between Stephen Curry and Sabrina Ionescu at NBA All-Star Weekend was incredible. Everything except Kenny Smith.

Ionescu pushed Curry to the final rack. She tied the score that Damian Lillard won the NBA three-point contest with moments earlier. The two shooters gave us a contest worthy of the hype, a remarkable feat considering “Steph vs. Sabrina” had been pushed to the moon. As Curry and Ionescu embraced at mid-court to raucous applause it was an iconic moment to be remembered, before Kenny Smith decided to throw cold water on the whole thing.

“She should have shot from the three-point line that the women shoot from,” Smith quipped, referencing the fact that Ionescu chose to shoot with a WNBA size ball (slightly smaller than its NBA equivalent), but compete from the NBA three-point line (which is slightly deeper than the WNBA line).

It was immediately met with disapproval.

We’ll circle back to what Smith says he meant with the comment, but in the moment it came off as reeking of misogyny. A desperate attempt to downplay what Ionescu did, and instead make it sound like he was ostensibly saying she wasn’t good enough to belong in the competition — when in reality Ionescu did better than any man did in the three-point contest aside from Lillard, during an era in the NBA where there are more shooters in the league that in any point in history.

Ionescu also handicapped herself by deciding to compete from the NBA three-point line, not because she’s unable to make shots from that deep, because time and time again she’s shown to have ludicrous range — but that shooting from the deeper line erased her muscle memory. Being a great three point shooter is part natural talent, and part tenacity. Shooters will spend hundreds of hours practicing from range to the point where it feels like second nature, and something as simple as moving back a little bit can have a drastic effect on accuracy, particularly in a contest where you’re grabbing off a rack and shooting as quickly as possible.

Reggie Miller took Smith’s comments as being misogynistic as well. This led to an awkward exchange between the two, which carried until the commercial break.

Smith says he was being complimentary of Ionescu through all this. That his comment was meant to convey that he felt it was unfair that Steph shot from the distance where he has muscle memory, while Ionescu shot from deeper. He attempted to clarify on The Stephen A. Smith Show Monday.

“Most people who know basketball understood what I was talking about. Actually, I was advocating for her, more than anything else, because basketball is muscle memory. So he practices from one range, she practices from another.”

Whether this is truly what Smith meant by his comments, or simply an attempt to get himself out of hot water is immaterial. The broadcaster failed the most fundamental part of his job: Educating viewers. While it’s fair to say “people who know basketball know what I meant,” it’s equally germane to acknowledge that the majority of people watching an All-Star weekend, especially a one-off marquee event like Steph vs. Sabrina, don’t understand shooting mechanics like muscle memory and how it pertains to shooting distance. They don’t understand what you meant — and it sounded to them like you were knocking Ionescu for being a woman.

If you’re a kid whose favorite player is Sabrina, you didn’t hear “muscle memory” in those remarks. You heard “she wasn’t good enough.” If you’re a 12-year-old boy who consumes content from misogynistic creators on YouTube, you heard “the best woman needed a handicap.” It may not have been the intention, but the result was solidifying the worst biases that exist over the WNBA and women’s basketball as a whole. And it comes at a time that women’s basketball has never, ever been better with superstars like Caitlen Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers turning pro in the next year or two — adding to an unprecedented amount of WNBA talent, which makes this the golden era of women’s basketball.

This was a great opportunity for Smith to explain why he thought the event was unfair to Sabrina, or highlight how she handicapped herself — instead of distilling it to a flippant one sentence remark about how she should have shot from closer. There were literally dozens of ways he could have done this in a way which celebrated the event, rather than detract from it.

Instead he went the quickest, laziest route possible.

This was a problem that wasn’t isolated to the shooting contest. The light, banter-style broadcasting given to All-Star Weekend conveyed little-to-no information over its three days. I know that’s part of the appeal of Inside the NBA, but it didn’t fit an event like this. Clowning on Jaylen Brown’s horrific dunks is one thing, because there’s nothing groundbreaking about the event — but TNT should have given the marquee shootout more gravitas than trust its usual slate of talking heads.

It would have been great to have some amazing WNBA shooters from the past on the desk, or at the very least some WNBA announcers who could contextualize the event from their perspective as well. This was a celebration of two of the sport’s biggest stars, regardless of gender, and it was given the same gravitas as the unserious sideshow events of the weekend.

The ultimate takeaway from all this is twofold: Firstly, we need more WNBA vs. NBA shooting showdowns. Perhaps in the future we can tweak the format to two rounds, using the NBA ball and NBA distance for one, and the WNBA ball and WNBA distance for the other — with some sort of tiebreaker if needed. That would even the playing field more, and add another layer of complexity. Secondly, we should be better. Part of the increasing trend of using former players as announcers comes at the sacrifice of there being jobs for people with media training, who understand how to convey a message, who don’t need to backtrack and say “people know what I meant” after the fact. While it’s certainly true that ex-players bring a layer of understanding non-players don’t, they also severely lack the communication skills needed for the job at times.

The worst part of all this is that we’re not able to simply celebrate Steph vs. Sabrina for what it was. Instead we have to discuss the comments surrounding that. It only happened with an event that featured a man and a woman competing against each other, and it shows we still have so far to go in how we market, present, and educated the masses with these events.

It’s just a shame.