Shaq Made Steph Curry Lose It By Making An Extremely Subtle FTX Joke

The NBA on TNT guys got to use Tuesday evening as an opportunity to celebrate Stephen Curry. Prior to Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals between the Miami Heat and the Boston Celtics which serves as an opportunity for the Heat to punch their ticket to the NBA Finals, Curry appeared on TNT in recognition of his being named the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion by the league earlier in the day.

It was the kind of interview you expect — some talk of Curry’s efforts in the community, a little ball talk, all that. But slid into all of this was a moment between Curry and Shaquille O’Neal, who has said for years that Curry is his favorite player. Shaq dropped a line in here that got Curry to start busting out laughing, but unlike a lot of the funny lines we get out of the Inside the NBA crew, only Curry and Shaq laughed.

Our hunch on what happened here: Curry and Shaq had a sponsorship deal where they did a commercial together with the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and in the aftermath of things going haywire, a number of celebrities who were linked to FTX were hit with a high-profile lawsuit that, per the New York Post, accused them of “engaging in deceptive practices to sell FTX yield-bearing digital currency accounts.” Curry and Shaq are among the celebrities involved, but Shaq has allegedly been evading efforts to serve him. Perhaps we are wrong on this one and this is not an FTX-related laugh, but regardless, Curry found the whole thing extremely funny.