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Screen grab: 'The Pat McAfee Show'
Brian Windhorst finally has a theory for why LeBron James took a swipe at him on ESPN’s airwaves, and it involves a doctored photo.
Appearing on The Press Box with Bryan Curtis, Windhorst addressed LeBron’s unprovoked shot at him during his March 2025 appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, in which LeBron dismissed ESPN’s senior NBA reporter as a “weird” guy who goes around claiming to be his best friend.
“He was just angry at Stephen A., and he had seen me say something on First Take,” Windhorst said. “I’ve never once said I was his best friend, ever. I’ve never, ever claimed to be a LeBron expert. Many, many people have attached that to me. I’ve never said those words — I don’t think — and if I did, it was not a sincere way to say it. I’ve never seen myself as anything but a journalist covering a great athlete.”
From there, Windhorst floated what he believes may have been the actual trigger. Whenever he appeared on The Pat McAfee Show, there was a running joke about Windhorst being LeBron’s high school teammate, which, technically speaking, was never true. Windhorst did attend St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, the same school LeBron attended, but he was seven years ahead of him. As part of the bit, The McAfee Show created a doctored photo of Windhorst’s face plastered onto one of LeBron’s high school team pictures. Windhorst’s theory is that LeBron saw the image and may not have understood that it was The McAfee Show that made it, not Windhorst himself.
“I do wonder about when he saw that picture if he thought I put that picture out or something,” Windhorst said. “I doubt he had watched The McAfee Show and seen my appearances and seen how Pat and the guys. They have conceits that they joke around with. I doubt he was aware of that. I’m not sure he knew the origin of it.”
Additionally, LeBron took specific issue with something Windhorst said about his Nike signing out of high school in 2003, disputing Windhorst’s framing — that Michael Jordan was one of the reasons the future 4-time MVP signed with Nike — as the main reason for his choice of the Swoosh.
Windhorst said he couldn’t remember the specifics of what he said, but remembered standing by it. The time and place of it — LeBron was deep in his war of words with Stephen A. Smith, and Windhorst had been appearing on Stephen A.’s show — likely didn’t help.
It wasn’t the last time LeBron took a shot at him. In June 2025, LeBron responded to a video of Windhorst casting doubt on his Mind the Game podcast, telling co-host Steve Nash that they “know nothing about basketball.”
As we noted at the time, the repeated nature of the attacks was off-putting given how long Windhorst had been in LeBron’s orbit. He covered him at St. Vincent-St. Mary, followed him to Cleveland for the Akron Beacon Journal and later the Plain Dealer, and then made the jump to ESPN as LeBron’s profile grew into something no single market could contain.
Windhorst told Curtis that LeBron’s people reached out after the McAfee incident, but they never told him that LeBron didn’t mean it.
That didn’t stop Windy from taking the high road. In his initial response two days after the diss, Windhorst claimed during an ESPN Cleveland appearance that “LeBron doesn’t owe me anything, I owe him a lot,” and expressed concern that the comments might damage his relationships with players around the league. As it turned out, the opposite happened. Windhorst said he was caught off guard by the volume of support he received from current and former NBA players in the weeks that followed, more than he ever expected to get.
The post Brian Windhorst wonders if ‘Pat McAfee Show’ gag could have fueled LeBron James beef appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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