On July 26, Milwaukee Bucks forward Kyle Kuzma made headlines for discussing politics — rather par for the course in the oft-politicized NBA. Shock of shocks, however, Kuzma’s comments were directed against, rather than in support of, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Kuzma responded on X to a theatrical July 22 video in which Mamdani continued calling for the federal government to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit New York. Mamdani had previously directed the city’s legal department to examine whether it could enforce the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant.
As a mayor with solely local jurisdiction at his disposal, Mamdani obviously has no legal authority to arrest visiting foreign leaders. The video was a blatant attempt to preserve the performance after a little thing called reality spoiled Mamdani’s show.
Kuzma rather accurately called a spade a spade. He mocked Mamdani as “a mayor playing president” and said, “We’re raising a generation that is learning the reward isn’t in doing the thing, it’s in looking like you did the thing. The clip is the career.”
As anyone who has followed the NBA in the last decade could tell you, political expression has become a routine part of the NBA’s schtick. The consensus among those who do speak politically — and who are, of course, political gurus — is overwhelmingly progressive.
From BLM messaging on courts and jerseys in 2020, the formation of the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition, and player campaigns for Democratic candidates, left-wing advocacy has been a legitimate and league-approved feature of the NBA. It is embraced by the league, not just grudgingly allowed.
Kuzma expressing the “wrong” politics is what generated the headlines on July 26, not that he chimed in with all his expertise from the three-point line.
Athletes are celebrated and lifted up as public paragons for “using their platforms” when the message conforms to the narrow ideological range of leftist talking points implicitly approved by the league: gun control, BLM, police brutality, “systemic racism,” and LGBT advocacy all come to mind.
The case of Jonathan Isaac, a player for the Orlando Magic, is a natural example of what happens when athletes stray from the party line of the NBA. In 2020, Isaac refused both to kneel during the national anthem and to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt. Isaac said that supporting black lives did not require kneeling or wearing the shirt, and grounded his position in the Gospel. In a league covered in BLM slogans, one player quietly standing became a controversial political spectacle for media outlets and armchair analysts to snipe at.
Kuzma in no way delivered a sweeping conservative manifesto grounded in Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley. Nor was his criticism particularly profound. He criticized a progressive, Democratic socialist mayor for being self-important and too big for his britches. The fact that an NBA player making a comment modestly critiquing a Democrat can generate dozens of headlines across sports, political, and general news outlets says far more about the ideological uniformity of professional basketball than it does about Kuzma.
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