Stephen A. Smith on Danny Ferry: "Leave this man alone. Let him come back."

Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless discussed on Wednesday’s episode of First Take whether or not Danny Ferry should be permitted to resume his role as Hawks general manager. Though you voluntarily clicked on the headline to watch and/or read about it, it’s probable that you reflexively groaned during the last sentence, but it was actually a nuanced dialogue where both made reasonable points and disagreed without yelling about it. Ferry, as you’ll recall, is on a leave of absence after an incident in which he said he was reading from a scouting report when he was recorded making a racially derogatory statement about Luol Deng.

After quoting Billy King as saying that he considered Ferry a “close friend” who stood at his wedding, Smith lavished praise on Ferry for assembling this great Hawks roster. He finished: “I applaud former mayor Andrew Young — civil rights leader, a dear confidant and friend of the late Martin Luther King Jr. To speak up on his behalf is something I totally applaud because what he is saying is what I am saying. You want to sit there and call somebody that egregious word [racist], and have that name attached to them, you had better know what the hell you’re talking about. That is not the case with Danny Ferry. Leave this man alone. Let him come back and be the general manager for the Atlanta Hawks.”

This is an about-face for Stephen A., who said in September that the Hawks should let Ferry go. To be fair, those comments were made when, in addition to the comments, this was before Atlanta drastically outperformed expectations and there were major reservations about Ferry as a general manager. Smith also said at the time that Ferry was not a racist.

Nevertheless, I … found myself agreeing with Skip Bayless? “To me, we cannot get away from the point that [Ferry] put it in a racist context,” he said. “That’s how it came across to me. That’s a racist context. To me, that’s my two cents. As a white man. I’m gonna say that. What I understood was that he gleaned the information from a source on another team for which Luol Deng had played, and he simply repeated on a conference call […] but if he had merely said, ‘You can’t trust Luol in the locker room. Maybe he can be a little difficult to deal with. You can’t always trust what he’s telling the media.’ That’s in a whole different context. But why use that [African]? It disturbed me at the time.”

I can see both sides, and don’t envy those who have to make a decision on whether or when Ferry should return.