Recently inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Doc Rivers prefers to keep his circle away from close friendships with people who support Donald Trump. That stance seems to have surfaced prominently after a recent podcast featuring ex-ESPN host Sage Steele.
Rivers and Steele, who used to collaborate at ESPN in coverage of the NBA, reportedly no longer share that professional bond. Steele indicated that their relationship has cooled, at least in part because she shifted toward a role as a conservative commentator and Trump supporter.
Steele charged that coaches like Rivers and Steve Kerr—both outspoken critics of the Trump administration—lacked sincerity.
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Steele also revealed that she stopped watching NBA games altogether until the postseason.
“Knowing that many of them say one thing and do another. And the passive-aggressiveness from some of these head coaches, whether it’s Steve Kerr or Doc Rivers—people I used to call a friend, especially Doc,” Steele told The Rubin Report, hosted by the far-right commentator Dave Rubin.
“I’ll show you later the DMs from this man,” Steele continued about Rivers. “Pages and pages explaining why I’m such a fool to be a Republican or to support Donald Trump. Out of the blue, he would send me clips, and I’d reply, ‘I just want to talk basketball with you’ or ‘How are your kids…?’”
“Instead, it’s, ‘I’m so disappointed’ and this sense of betrayal by a coach. That kind of thing turns people off from sports. It doesn’t mean you can’t hold that opinion. I did, too. I simply didn’t express it while I was working in sports.”
Rivers, who most recently coached the Milwaukee Bucks, was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last weekend.
During his tenure with the Bucks last season, Rivers spoke out repeatedly against the Trump administration’s ICE policies. He even commented on the shooting deaths of protesters Renee Good and Alex Preti by ICE officers in Minnesota.
“The training of ICE is horrible. We all know that,” Rivers stated in February, per The Athletic. “And being in Minnesota, where there are around 130,000 undocumented people, why not Texas, where there are roughly 1.7 million undocumented?”
“I look at our league. I look at the NBA. We’re celebrating Pioneer’s Day today, right? And I look at our league and think (Hakeem) Olajuwon could have been taken off the streets,” he said, alluding to the Houston Rockets legend. “But we would, right now, in the current climate, have only Brown people being taken off the streets, and that’s just not right. It’s not morally right, so I stand by my words 100 percent.”
Steele spent 16 years at ESPN before leaving in 2023 after filing a lawsuit against the network. She, a former anchor of NBA Countdown, claimed ESPN breached her contract and violated her civil rights when she was briefly taken off the air after making inflammatory remarks about President Barack Obama.
In the remarks that sparked the dispute with ESPN, Steele described Obama’s choice to identify as Black as “strange,” given that his Black father was largely absent from his childhood while he was raised by a white mother and grandmother.
At the time, NFL analyst Ryan Clark—fired by ESPN earlier this summer—refused to appear on-air with Steele.
Rivers announced his retirement from coaching in April, ending a 27-season career on the NBA sidelines.
