Stephen A Smith Claims There's A Rift Between Kyrie & Harden, Cites Ballsack Sports

Stephen A. Smith was seemingly fooled by the NBA-focused satire account on Twitter, Ballsack Sports.

On Monday’s episode of First Take, Smith seems to have referenced the tweet during a segment on Harden’s recent struggles.

"Especially when Kyrie looked him in the face, according to reports, and told him, 'you're washed up,'" Smith said on Monday's episode of First Take. "That's part of the reason they had a falling out in Brooklyn."

In February, Ballsack Sports shared a graphic detailing how Kyrie Irving talked trash to James Harden in practice while the two were teammates and cited a “Brooklyn Nets executive on the growing rift between Kyrie and Harden.”

“Kyrie beat James Harden 1 on 1 almost everyday in practice, and Kyrie was barely even in basketball shape,” the satirical graphic read. “It demoralized Harden. Things reached the breaking point came when Kyrie called Harden ‘washed’ after completely locking him up in one scrimmage. An assistant had to break up the two as tempers flared, and the relationship spiraled downhill from there.”

The Athletic did publish a story a day before the Ballsack Sports satire graphic, on Feb. 10, that mentioned a "weird vibe between" Harden and Irving, and factors that could have contributed to Irving's role in the Harding trade, though.

If you click Balllsack's Twitter, the account displays this pinned tweet:

“I don’t want to be, you know, the guy that’s traced back to a misinformation spread for all the wrong reasons,” said Matt, a 24-year-old who runs the Ballsack Sports account, in an interview with Awful Announcing. “That’s my end goal. To not get picked up by Fox News. To not get picked up by Sports Illustrated. I think there’s some websites that will deliberately pick me up to get that clickbait attention, but my end goal is to hopefully help stop what I’m doing.”