Shannon Sharpe Comes After The Clippers Fanbase

The LA Clippers officially announcing their move to a brand new Inglewood arena in 2024 has seemingly irritated many of their haters. While Steve Ballmer has already addressed the portion of the Lakers fanbase that has met the move with animosity, the contention has not been limited to just fans.
Shannon Sharpe, a former NFL player and current co-host of FS1's Undisputed, has spent a significant amount of time on Twitter this past week claiming that the Clippers have no real fans. Sharpe, who is well-known for his LeBron James fandom, sent out this Tweet on Thursday:
Clipper fans, are only family members and friends of family members of Clipper players. Nice try tho 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/fw5GjTHbOT
— shannon sharpe (@ShannonSharpe) September 24, 2021
It was a response to a seemingly well-intended rebuttal to a comment he made on Undisputed. On Wednesday's segment of the show, Sharpe said that said he has never once seen a Clipper fan in Los Angeles. Unless Sharpe is entirely committed to his anti-Clippers bias, to the extent of ignoring facts, he did not watch any Clippers home games this past postseason.
Once the team was permitted a full-capacity crowd by Los Angeles County, every single home game at Staples Center was a sold-out show. This is nothing new for the Clippers, who have been in the top-10 in fan attendance for over a decade; however, for Sharpe, this still doesn't prove the existence of Clipper fans.
When it was pointed out to Sharpe that the Clippers have sold out every game for years, he claimed that fans only show up to see the opposition play. Unless there are 20,000 Utah Jazz fans in Los Angeles, this seems like an unreasonable explanation to the sold-out scene we witnessed during the Western Conference Semi-Finals.
While Sharpe and others will continue their attempts to suppress the Clippers brand, Steve Ballmer will not be deterred in his pursuit of building a premier NBA franchise.
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Joey Linn is a credentialed writer covering the NBA and WNBA for On SI. Covering the LA Clippers independently in 2018, then for Fansided and 213Hoops from 2019-2021, Joey joined On SI to cover the Clippers after the 2020-21 season. Graduating from Biola University in 2022 with a Communication Studies degree, Joey served as Biola's play-by-play announcer for their basketball, baseball, softball, and soccer teams. Joey's work on Biola's broadcasts and in the classroom earned him the Outstanding Communication Studies Student of the year award in 2022. Joey covers the NBA full-time, primarily serving as a Clippers beat writer.
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