The first thing Blake Griffin does after settling into our Zoom call (following, of course, the opening pleasantries; “El Niño is a buzz word in Los Angeles these days,” he says of the city’s unusually warm weather stretch) is take a trip down memory lane.
“When I was with the Clippers, one day we were in the training room,” Griffin tells Sports Illustrated. “We used to always like to have TVs on in the training room before practice. First Take was on. It was the height of Skip [Bayless] and Stephen A. [Smith], and the topic was our team. They're both just going back and forth, back and forth. We're all sitting there, listening to it and dying laughing. They were both just saying things that were so wrong, and making something out of nothing.
“I remember sitting there just thinking of myself after that, being like, ‘Man. Where do you go to not just hear about what happened last night or whatever the newest debate is, but where do you go to hear what actually matters to sports fans?’ Because there's plenty of shows, and there's shows that do it really well. First Take, I'm not knocking First Take because it's a show that people obviously love to consume. But where’s that show that’s fact-based and delivering information on topics that affects fans?”
