I’ve long been a bit of a closeted LeBron James defender. You gotta be careful when defending LeBron here at Barstool Sports. The company line has long been that LeBron is a self-absorbed alcoholic communist who isn’t worth of being compared to the gum on the bottom of Michael Jordan’s shoe. But personally, I think he’s a good basketball player and overall a pretty solid human being. But don’t repeat that.

I don’t have much of a defense for this move though. It’s just very stupid. I couldn’t care less about anyone taking money out of YouTubeTV or ESPN or Big Cable’s pockets. Fuck those guys. But using illegal streams is just a terrible experience. The websites are shady, the streams are unreliable, they’re littered with pop-up ads. Every time I’m done using one I feel like my computer needs a shower. Every once in a while you’ll catch a hot streak and go a few weeks, or maybe even a couple months without any real issues. But the moment you’re relying on a website like Stream East for a game you really need to watch, it’s going to crash out. Then you’re sitting there refreshing your computer like crazy, Googling “free mavericks timberwolves stream”, clicking on every suspicious link under the sun. Nobody wants to do that.

Some people who watch this video will do the whole, “LeBron James is using Stream East! He’s just like us!” thing. But that’s very stupid. He’s not like us. He’s LeBron James. Although I can’t completely put it past LeBron that he would do this in hopes that someone would take this exact video and the internet would say, “Wow! How relatable of him!.” But that would be psychotic behavior. He can’t be that crazy… right?

LeBron James using Stream East is just objectively making his life harder. YouTubeTV is what, $75 per month? The minute I was making over $50,000 per year I retired from the illegal stream life (except for to watch RedZone because that shit is expensive, but even I bit the bullet on that recently). LeBron is a billionaire. The process of closing out the ads on Stream East alone probably takes longer than buying a YouTubeTV subscription. You’re being dumb LeBron. Just buy any sort of Tv/cable subscription. You’re taking Stream East bandwidth away from the people who actually need it.