Always-Wrong ESPN Fuck-Up Chris Broussard Wrong Yet Again

Resets the “Chris Broussard Has Worked __ Days Without Fucking Up A Report” sign in the Deadspin office.

Earlier tonight, Chris Broussard reported in ALL CAPS that Tristan Thompson planned to sign a three year, $53 million contract with the Cavaliers:

Just about the time he was phoning in to SportsCenter (video above) to discuss the meaning of Thompson’s signing, Cavaliers beat reporters threw cold water on his report:

As is usually the case when Broussard and others offer differing reports, Broussard got this one wrong, and had to row back his report to the fact that Thompson was willing to sign the deal, but had not yet done so.

Screwing up the report is bad, but the way that Broussard did so is instructive. In the original tweet Broussard namechecks Thompson’s (and LeBron’s) agent Rich Paul, and follows that up with a lame analysis about how it’s a great deal for Thompson, which is really just a way for Broussard to praise Paul. Never mind, of course, that all previous reporting indicated that Thompson was holding out for a full five-year max contract.

Broussard’s corrected reportering makes it obvious that his sourcing is coming from Paul, and that he didn’t properly check in with Cavaliers sources about whether the deal was even on the table for Thompson to sign. The thing here isn’t that Broussard got a Caps Locked report wrong—people get things wrong, and that’s okay—but that in the process he revealed his threadbare sourcing, and how willing he is to just act as the hand-puppet of an agent.

At this point, we have to assume that Broussard has pictures of ESPN president John Skipper fighting for ISIS or something, right? ESPN has at least three better, less mechanically corrupt breaking news reporters—Marc Stein, Brian Windhorst, and Ramona Shelburne—who already break more and more important news than Broussard, who write more and better non-breaking news stories, and by the way aren’t liable to pop off about the gays on a random Tuesday. Is having Broussard in Bristol to do the occasional live SportsCenter hit really worth the trouble?

Broussard made it 78 days without an egregious error. Last time it was his fallacious report that Mark Cuban was driving around Dallas begging DeAndre Jordan to talk to him via text, which he apologized for in a tweet that just so happens to have been deleted.

When—not if—will he fuck up again?

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