Supposed James Harden-Tyrese Maxey Bench Incident Is Fake News

The Philadelphia 76ers put a momentary scare into the Miami Heat during Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series last night before the lack of Joel Embiid and a near-perfect performance from Bam Adebayo proved decisive. With the result decided, Sixers backcourt mates Tyrese Maxey and James Harden headed to their bench. And this happened.

Now, if you couldn't pick it up from the extremely subtle Tyrese Maxey Doesn't Want To Sit Next To James Harden:" You F*cking Suck !" title, the implication here is that these two don't like each other. It also attributes a quote to Maxey that he didn't say with some of the most confusing and confounding punctuation you'll ever see. Random-ass spaces, including one before the closing exclamation mark make one wonder how the education system could have failed this person.

But, like ... you can't do this. This YouTube video has a million views. A million times people have navigated over to YouTube and watched a video of Maxey moving away from Harden twice on the bench and most have walked away thinking there was a verbal confrontation. We live in hell and misinformation is the most valuable resource.

What actually happened on the bench — if anyone cares and at this point it's abundantly clear they don't — is that Maxey was motioned over by Sixers assistant Sam Cassell, so he changed seats. That's it.

And it just doesn't matter. Because people saw this initial video, read the caption, and kept it moving. In their minds, Harden and Maxey had it out on the bench and the Sixers have extreme chemistry issues in addition to personnel issues.

The internet continues to be a massive mistake.