JaVale McGee says media lowlights damaged his NBA reputation

JaVale McGee is looking back at how quickly a joke became a label.

In comments shared through a Streamable clip and discussed on Reddit, McGee said he did not understand early in his career how powerful the media could be. "I did one bad play, but I had 15 and six blocks, but y'all didn't show none of that," he said. The mistakes were real. His issue is that they became the whole story.

McGee also tied that image to NBA programming. "And then the NBA started getting behind it too," he said, describing how repeated lowlights made people view him as a bad player rather than an athletic big man with loud errors.

His sharpest line was about the business side of that role. "I can be the clown in the league," McGee said. "You got the WWE, the villain, the good guy. But both are getting paid." If the league and media wanted that character, he argued, they needed to pay him "clown money."

The reaction around the post mostly landed on the same point: McGee had memorable bloopers, but he also built a long NBA career, won titles and became useful in the right role.