Michelle Beadle left ESPN in 2019, but she has never stayed quiet as to why she thinks her departure from the Worldwide Leader in Sports happened.
This week, the former host of ESPN’s NBA Countdown joined the Awful Announcing Podcast to speak about her leaving and she even suggested that LeBron James played a pivotal role in her departure.
She explained this time around that James wanted her replaced from ESPN’s pregame show “NBA Countdown.”
“He’s a powerful dude, there’s no getting around that. He is an empire and entity upon himself, and all respect for building such a powerful entity on name and doing it well,” Beadle said. “I don’t think they replaced me immediately, and that was, I guess, somebody’s way of kind of having my back but it didn’t feel like it.”
Beadle was removed from ESPN’s NBA Countdown in the summer of 2019 and replaced by Rachel Nichols who has since left the network as well.
Speaking of Nichols — Beadle also claimed Nichols played a part in her dismissal.
Click on ‘Follow Us’ and get notified of the most viral NBA stories via Google! Follow Us
“You hear things, you know things, you’re told things, and then you get to sort of stand away and watch the house burn. You’re just like, ‘Holy Cow,'” Beadle said.
Beadle is currently part of the San Antonio Spurs’ broadcast team.
Nichols left the network after a recording of her was leaked in which she was critical of ESPN’s upper management favoring another analyst, Maria Taylor, and claiming that it was because she was Black.
