Sixers

There is Good Rage Bait and Then There is Whatever the Hell WFAN Posted on Monday

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 12th, 2026 · 12:31 PM EDT

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You’re not supposed to feed the trolls, but this rage bait is so bad that we have to highlight its incredible stupidity:

Tommy says New York has rendered Philadelphia a non-sports town:@tommylugauer pic.twitter.com/KswYueQ1Ak

— WFAN Sports Radio (@WFAN660) May 11, 2026

“New York City is the greatest city in the world. Number two, Philly is a dump. Number three, New York continues to show its dominance in the playoff series between New York and Philly, to the point where we all know who big brother is. That’s New York. And we all know that Philly doesn’t even register as a sports town anymore. I mean your hockey team got swept. Your basketball team got swept. You’ve already fired your (baseball) manager, but most importantly, when Philly steps up to the plate to face a New York team in the playoffs, it is a one-sided, belt-to-ass beatdown in favor of the New York team. And we know Philly wants to be just like New York. They dream of being the greatest city in the world, but they never will be, they’ll always be a second rate, not even registering on the sports town meter anymore… etc”

This is the way I see it: there are two types of rage bait. There is funny/comedic rage bait that comes from the trolling world. It’s the artisanal form of ball busting that we weaponized against Penguins fans recently. Those fat Yinzers! Then the other type of rage bait is sports talk radio rage bait, when some nobody gets on the microphone and blathers a bunch of nonsense in an effort to get people all riled up. It comes from the engagement farming tree and lacks the creativity of facetious banter.

The thing with this particular clip is that the accent just ruins everything. Even if the rage bait was good, which it’s not, this guy sounds like Joe Pesci talking to the judge in My Cousin Vinny. It sounds like the guy behind the deli counter auditioning for the role of Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos by recreating the bakery scene: “I’m next, now get a fucking pastry box.“

But the content of the screed is all backwards anyway:

• “your hockey team got swept” – True, but this was the first time ever that the Rangers, Islanders, and Devils all missed the playoffs at the same time. That’s almost impossible to do when the New York City metro area makes up 3/8ths of the Metropolitan Division. You have to REALLY suck for that to happen.
• “your basketball team got swept” – We don’t care, as you could see with the Game 3 and Game 4 attendance. However, the Knicks haven’t won the title since 1973 and the Nets have never won a title.
• “you’ve already fired (Rob Thomson)” – And yet the Phils are clawing their way back to .500 while the Mets sport the worst record in baseball.
• (Philly vs. New York playoff record) – Not a big deal. Two wins for the Knicks against a 7-seed Sixers. The Mets had a good NLDS win against the Phillies, but the Mets are a disgrace otherwise. The biggest New York/Philly playoff game in recent history was Eagles 38, Giants 7 in the divisional round.
• (general New York stuff) – NYC has nine teams from the four majors and last won a title in 2012. Philly has four teams and two championships in that same time frame. For the pure volume that New York has, every team outside of the Yankees has underachieved significantly going back about 15 years now. And the only reason the Yanks are relevant is because there’s no salary cap in baseball. They’ve underperformed relative to investment and expectation over many seasons now. Honestly, the best New York team for several years was NYC FC, which is a fake oil team that Major League Soccer shoehorned into Yankee Stadium.

Anyway, WFAN is so bad. Bunch of bald guys who cheat on their pregnant wives, go to jail for fraud, and fail to practice personal hygiene. Hopefully Mr. Lugauer is not on that path. Maybe he can be saved. But in this case, what he has said is one of the most insanely idiotic things we have ever heard. At no point in his rambling, incoherent response was he even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in the Mid-Atlantic corridor is now dumber for having listened to it.