Jay Williams accuses Kevin Durant’s USA basketball comments of having ‘racist victimhood mentality’

Jay Williams saw Kevin Durant’s comments about USA basketball, and questioned his decision to make the discussion a racial one.

Durant recently confirmed his plans of playing in the 2028 Summer Olympics to ESPN. And in doing so, Durant took issue with the narrative that European basketball is better than American basketball.

“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 bullsh*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.”

Thursday morning, Jay Williams joined First Take to push back on Durant a bit for making the differences between the way European and American basketball players are developed into racial issue.

“It felt a little bit like a racist, victimhood mentality, frankly…Because critiquing a development system is not critiquing a race. And we’re talking about development systems for Americans” – Jay Williams responds to Kevin Durant’s USA basketball take pic.twitter.com/k0A9gnn0LB

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“The first argument was about AAU Basketball, which is a completely different argument than the Black American thing,” Williams argued. “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.”

There are two separate discussions stemming from what Kevin Durant told ESPN regarding USA basketball. Certainly, there are people who would prefer to see more white players in the NBA. It’s fair to question whether those are the people the NBA should be seeking to reach. But earlier this week, Stephen A. Smith claimed “whitening” the league was an ancillary motive behind the NBA’s globalization efforts. The second discussion is whether Europe does a better job of teaching fundamentals than youth basketball programs in America. And according to Jay Williams, that discussion does not need to be hijacked by race.