Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant, Team USA’s all-time leading scorer on the men’s side, recently made it known that he hopes to play in the 2028 Summer Games as long as he’s still able to contribute at a high level.
Durant also made it known that he doesn’t appreciate the narrative that European basketball has surpassed the sport in the United States.“I just don’t like the talk around the USA versus European style of how you approach the game,” Durant told ESPN.
“All I hear is, ‘AAU is destroying the game; the Euros do it right while the Americans do it wrong.’“It’s a lot of bulls–t with that. I can read between the lines on that. It’s a shot at Black Americans. We’re controlling the sport. They’re tired of us controlling the sport.”
On Thursday, Jay Williams appeared on First Take and addressed Durant’s comments.
“The first argument was about AAU Basketball, which is a completely different argument than the Black American thing,” Williams said. “Whenever you bring race into something like this, it hijacks a conversation and takes away from the initial point. To me, it felt a little bit like a racist, victimhood mentality, frankly. And it concerned me a tad. Because critiquing a development system is not critiquing a race. And we’re talking about development systems for Americans.”
“The thing that really bothered me ultimately about the comment is that we’ve heard American players talk about this for the longest time,” Williams continued.
“Michael Jordan, Larry Bird. In 2015, Kobe Bryant literally said ‘European players are taught how to play the game the right way … in the U.S., we teach athleticism first. Over there, they teach skill and IQ first.’ To me, Kobe never framed this as a racial or predominantly Black thing, he never said European players were better, he was just saying the way they developed was different.
“And I feel like when KD goes off on these rants, it doesn’t mean that he’s fully wrong. But when you just engage it that way, it sounds a little bit reckless. And it also feels as if it can polarize a statement to a country where we’re all in the middle of Black History Month, like Morgan Freeman always said, Black history should never be minimized to a month, it should be American history.”
The reality is that until another country can knock the U.S. off its gold medal pedestal, basketball in the States will reign supreme.
About Qwame Skinner
Qwame Skinner has loved both writing and sports his entire life. In addition to his sports coverage at Comeback Media, Qwame writes novels, and his debut; The First Casualty, an adult fantasy, is out now.