Here’s a recipe for trouble: Take a Smith brother, add some Twitter and sprinkle a dash of Knicks roster upheaval.
This time it was Chris Smith — younger brother of repeat Twitter offender J.R. Smith and currently a reserve guard for the Erie Bayhawks of the D-League after a two-minute stint with the Knicks that cost the team roughly $2.1 million — committing the social-media faux pas.
Late Monday night, Chris Smith reposted two tweets that called for him to replace Beno Udrih, who has asked the Knicks for a trade, according to ESPN.
Udrih, the third-string point guard, is again buried in the rotation with Raymond Felton and Pablo Prigioni returning from injuries. Chris Smith, the Knicks’ erstwhile fifth-string point guard, is not considered a candidate to return to the NBA roster.
The worse of the two retweets, which were later deleted from Smith’s timeline yet preserved via a screengrab, says of Udrih — who hails from Slovenia — “send his ass to the Himalayas! And freeze to death!”
Chris Smith seems to have learned little from the travails of his older brother, who has twice been fined by the NBA for inappropriate Twitter usage — once for posting a photo of a woman’s bare backside and once for making threats to Pistons guard Brandon Jennings in defense of Chris — and more recently caused waves with an Instagram post that alluded to the Knicks demoting Chris Smith as a “betrayal.”
Chris Smith later denied culpability in his final tweet of the evening: