Jay Williams And Jalen Rose Had A Terrible Week At ESPN

Jay Williams And Jalen Rose Had A Terrible Week At ESPN | Sports Takes & News | TooAthletic.com

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As basketball fans are trying to focus on the NBA’s two Conference Finals matches, two of the talking heads of ESPN’s basketball coverage had a really bad week with comments made to those fans. The two commentators, Jay Williams and Jalen Rose, each made race-based comments about recent basketball news, and each turned out to be just as color blind as the other, yet it appears their employers at ESPN chose to let their comments slide without taking action against them publicly. That forces me to ask the question, what does it take to get fired from ESPN nowadays? 

WOW Jay Williams. FIRST??? Did you forget about the 5 NBA championship teams coached by Bill Russell, KC Jones, & Doc Rivers?

Tom "Satch" Sanders has also coached the C's & ML Carr was both a coach & GM.

No wonder why non-C's fans are so clueless about Boston's history pic.twitter.com/eb4vl9Imff

— CelticsLife.com (@celticslife) June 23, 2021

The race-base comments started midweek when Jay Williams attempted to praise the Boston Celtics for hiring Brooklyn Nets’ assistant Ime Udoka as the team’s “first head coach of color.” Of course, despite the city’s less than favorable reputation towards Black athletes, Boston has had five NBA head coaches of color, including the league’s first, Bill Russell, who was a player/coach.

Bill Russell was the first of three Celtics head coaches of color to win an NBA title, and paved the way for K.C. Jones and Doc Rivers to also coach and win a championship for the franchise. The mistake was so embarrassing for Jay Williams, that the ESPN commentator was forced to claim his phone was hacked when the comments were posted to his Twitter account, an excuse most are not buying.

Then you have Jalen Rose. 

Despite being excited for Olympic hoops, @JalenRose is disappointed in Team USA's token selection of Kevin Love. pic.twitter.com/VgKUeRicAB

— Jalen & Jacoby (@JalenandJacoby) June 24, 2021

Rose who sits alongside Williams for ESPN’s coverage of the Western Conference Finals, also works on his “Jalen and Jacoby” talk show for the network. While Rose tried to poke fun at Williams by trying to justify something wrong he said by saying “I was hacked,” Rose also made a color-coded remark about the roster that Team USA plans to send to Tokyo for next month’s Summer Olympic Games. Rose, like Williams, forgot some basketball history by saying, “Kevin Love is on the (Olympic) team because of tokenism … Don’t be scared to make an all-black team representing the United States of America. I’m disappointed by that.”

Rose forgot just five years ago, the Team USA Men’s Basketball Team that went to Rio had an All-Black roster of players. In fact, since the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, every Men’s Basketball team has been All-Black except for 2012 when Kevin Love was also part of the team that went to London. Rose, skipped over the last two decades of Olympic Basketball and went all the way back to 1992, citing that Christian Laettner was chosen for the 1992 Dream Team.

I fully understand that every commentator in every line of work is going to filter their opinions through the life experiences they have had. I would hope, however, that schools like Duke and Michigan (where Williams and Rose attended college) would do a better job of educating their student-athletes on the history of the sports they play, including the racial injustices that took place in those sports over the years. Then, however, I would also expect and honestly demand that when these athletes become commentators, they have a much better understanding of the history of the game they are talking about while also being held to the same standards that all other commentators are held to in their jobs.

With the comments made by Jay Williams and Jalen Rose drawing no public reprimand from ESPN or its parent company Disney, it appears that some people who speak into microphones have permission to say anything they want regardless of if its correct or not. The only things this proved to me is that some businesses don’t value integrity from its employees, something mass media gave up on years ago, and that those broadcasting games and working pre and postgame shows are even less valuable than I thought previously. Because if a commentator can make the comment Williams and Rose made and still have their jobs, I know there is nothing from a historical perspective they can teach me, with their overall judgement also in doubt.

I now know that working for ESPN must be a great place to work, because even when you embarrass yourself and your company, you can still make millions of dollars by keeping your job and go on making ill-informed statements for years to come. 

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Jay Williams And Jalen Rose Had A Terrible Week At ESPN | TooAthletic.com

The post Jay Williams And Jalen Rose Had A Terrible Week At ESPN appeared first on TOOATHLETIC TAKES.

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By: Rafael Thomas
Title: Jay Williams And Jalen Rose Had A Terrible Week At ESPN
Sourced From: tooathletic.com/jay-williams-and-jalen-rose-had-a-terrible-week-at-espn/
Published Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2021 15:03:46 +0000

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