“It was the league I was most familiar with, and also my favorite to watch,” Chris said. He then spent a weekend going through every NBA roster, searching for problematic keywords in tweets. “The culture of homophobia in sports runs very deep, especially in a hyper-masculine league like the NBA.” Outsports has verified Chris’ identity, but he asked for anonymity out of fear of online attacks from fans of the players or teams.īeing a big NBA fan, Chris decided to check the accounts of some of his favorite players and found various homophobic tweets. “It was shocking but not surprising,” Chris said of the number of homophobic tweets he found. When “Chris,” a young NBA fan who is gay, saw the tweets, they saddened and angered him. I’m not for people losing their jobs, but words like that can’t be tolerated.” “It’s a slap in the face to me, to other people in my community. “I don’t care how long ago it was, it shows the person’s character, in my opinion,” said Derrick Gordon, who came out publicly as gay while playing basketball at UMass and who now plays professionally in Germany. The players include CJ McCollum, the president of the National Basketball Players Assn., who tweeted “no homo,” as well as superstar Kevin Durant, who tweeted “shut up fag boy.” While they may not reflect how these players feel about LGBTQ people today - we don’t know until they tell us - all the tweets were still active as of March 4 (some have been deleted after players became aware of this impending story, though Outsports has a screen capture of every tweet). With very few exceptions, all of these messages were sent from the players’ accounts from 2009 through 2013, in some cases years before they joined the league. These comments are among 78 tweets from 36 current and active NBA players on teams that are homophobic in language, nature or even intent (four other players were on a roster when the list was compiled last month, but they are no longer on an NBA team). That being said, let’s get into four reasons why the Warriors should consider signing Gay with the team’s MLE.The words are from more than a decade ago, but they still hurt today.
Golden State must be on notice, and it’s likely that he’ll also draw interest from other contenders.
He won’t be a big-name free agent this offseason, and like throughout his career, he’ll likely go unnoticed. Gay deserves to earn an eight-figure salary. That’s just over $5 million which obviously isn’t ideal since he’s coming off a season averaging just under 14 points per game. Gay would likely be forced into the mid-level exception. That said, Gay is coming off a one-year, $10 million contract with San Antonio.
One of the few to bounce back just as strong, Gay could bring a valuable asset, one that knows how to battle through injury.
The devasting injury typically decimates the individual’s career. Then, he, like Durant did in Game 5 of the NBA Finals, ruptured his Achilles. In the prime of his career, Gay scored over 21 points per game. Gay has been underrated his entire career.