Stan Van Gundy isn't afraid to voice his opinion on things bigger than basketball. You might remember his reaction as head coach of the Pistons when Donald Trump was elected President in 2016.
"This guy is openly and brazenly racist and misogynistic," Van Gundy said. "We have just thrown a good part of our population under the bus."
Van Gundy, now head coach of the Pelicans, published an essay in The Players' Tribute on Wednesday urging Americans to "reckon with the racism and hatred that’s been building in this country, long before any individual president took office." And to ask them what they want to do about it.
In the essay, Van Gundy recalls former Pistons Marcus Morris and Tobias Harris approaching him around the time Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and social injustice. Morris and Harris wanted to help further Kaepernick's message.
What followed was an experience that sticks with Van Gundy to this day:
They said, “Hey, we’ve got to do something.” And we got them involved with Jocelyn Benson. She’s now the secretary of state in Michigan, but at the time she was the CEO of RISE, the Ross Initiative in Sports for Equality, which does work around race and sports. And she helped them organize a policing town hall.
A lot of activists and people from the community came, and to hear our players tell their own stories — tearfully in a lot of cases — about what they had gone through growing up, and how they had been treated in their communities, and how painful it clearly still was for them? That was really poignant for me, because I deeply respected and loved those guys. Tobias Harris, Marcus Morris, Reggie Jackson. And to really hear the depths of the pain? Yeah, that hurt.
Read the rest of Van Gundy's essay here.
"I’ve been pretty outspoken over the years, and I know I kind of have a certain reputation for it," he writes. "There are a lot of things I care about, like equality and racial justice, and I’m not gonna be quiet about them. I’m not gonna stay silent. I’m proud of that."