How a simple DeMarcus Cousins tweet led to a Kings announcer being pushed to resign

Grant Napear is no longer doing Kings broadcasts.

Grant Napear had been the voice of Sacramento Kings broadcasts since 1988, up until Tuesday, when he resigned.

The reason? It all started with a response he made to a tweet from former Kings star DeMarcus Cousins, who asked for his opinion on Black Lives Matter on Twitter as protests continue over the death of George Floyd.

Let’s start there: Cousins tweeted at Napear, “what’s your take on BLM?” on Sunday. Napear responded later that night, asking how Cousins was and giving his all-caps answer: “Haven’t heard from you in years. ALL LIVES MATTER…EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!”

Since that tweet, Napear was fired from his radio show and he resigned from the Kings job.

Napear also responded to tweets from people trying to explain why “all lives matter” is dismissive of “Black lives matter” (if you’re confused, you should read this Vox post from 2016):

Cousins responded “Lol as expected,” while former Kings Matt Barnes (saying “would expect nothing less from closet racists”) and Chris Webber weighed in about Napear as well:

This brings up a question: if Cousins knew to expect that kind of answer from Napear and others concurred, did the forward bait Napear into that answer?

There’s another wrinkle being brought up by folks on Twitter: Three years ago, Napear was extremely vocal about how he was glad Cousins was leaving the team:

This led many NBA fans to speculate that Cousins had simply been biding his time, waiting for his moment for revenge:

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