VIDEO: LeBron Pretended Like He Didn't Know Anything About Mo Speights' Bottle Emoji Tweet

A reporter asked LeBron: “Obviously there’s plenty of motivation for you guys going down 3-1, but was there any added fuel extra at all after Klay said what he said yesterday, after Speights’s tweeting, after some of the sniping that was going on yesterday?”

If you’ll recall, Klay Thompson mockingly apologized if LeBron’s feelings had been hurt, and Marreese Speights sent the infamous bottle emoji tweet. Ayesha Curry was not above the fray.

Surely, these things served as bulletin board material. How could they not? And so of course LeBron laughed the question off. How could he have seen it? This is, after all, Zero-Dark Thirty-23 Zone.

“I’m not on social media right now so I don’t know what Speights said,” LeBron answered. “I don’t really think that even matters. You guys make me laugh. I swear you guys do. My only motivation is my teammates and my coaching staff. Especially being in this building, it’s just us versus the Warriors and their unbelievable fan base. So many other things that we have to be challenged about.”

This was peak LeBron gamesmanship. He goaded Draymond Green’s suspension, internalized the Warriors’ posturing, ripped their hearts out for an evening, and is now acting like none of this was driven by pettiness. Clearly, the stakes in and of themselves are high for LeBron in the NBA Finals, but it’s human nature to manufacture any and every slight into your performance.

LeBron, by the way, doesn’t even really expect anyone to believe the words that are coming out of his mouth, even as he’s chastising the Evil Media for trying to gin up more controversy. Everything he says and does is carefully orchestrated. This is a guy who wore an Undertaker shirt this weekend to symbolize how his team needed to come back from the dead.

LeBron knew damn well nobody would come away thinking he was ignorant of that bottle emoji tweet – even if he’s truly off social media, someone else would have told him about it – but he still delivered the perfect promo for the circumstances at-hand.