Detroit Pistons Coach Goes Off On Trump For Position On NFL Kneeling

WASHINGTON, DC — Detroit Pistons Coach Steve Van Gundy on Friday ripped President Trump’s attempt to redefine the national debate over NFL players who kneel during the national anthem as disrespectful to the military and the American flag. Van Gundy, who previously has said that Trump is “brazenly racist and misogynistic,” told reporters before the Pistons’ matchup with the Washington Wizards that it’s time to shift the discussion back to the original purpose of the protests.

“I don’t know what good could come out of anything the president has said,” Van Gundy said. “As far as the athletes’ protests, I hope that people would pay attention to the issues that have caused the protests in the first place and realize that we have a problem, disproportionately, with police brutality towards men of color. And, women of color. But, particularly, men of color.

“We have a real problem with injustices in our criminal justice system,” the 58-year-old coach continued. “The sentences are different between whites and people of color for the same crimes; drug offenses in particular are treated vastly different, both in terms of who we go arrest and who we put in jail and for how long, based on color.” (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Detroit Patch, and click here to find your local Michigan Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

If anything good is to come out of the conflict, it’s that people will begin to “pay attention to those issues and care,” Van Gundy said, noting later that not everyone in America has had the same opportunity “to live the so-called American dream, and that needs to change.”

Van Gundy said America’s service men and women have fought for the First Amendment right to free speech, and the protests started last year by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick are in keeping with the country’s values.

“If you don’t stand for freedom of speech, if you don’t think these players have the right of freedom of speech, then what American values are you for? I don’t get it. I really don’t. Those people are supposed to be the patriots? The ones that are up there booing the players that are kneeling down?”

Watch the video, tweeted by Washington Post sports reporter Candace Buckner, below:

In 2016, a day after Trump won the presidency in a bitterly divisive election campaign, Van Gundy launched into a searing six-minute diatribe against Trump, saying voters had “thrown a good part of our population under the bus.”

Van Gundy made the remarks after the Pistons had lost a game to the Phoenix Suns. He thought they were unusually quiet and somber because of the loss, but realized later it was because they were despondent over Trump’s win. At the time, he said Trump’s election sends a message to women and people of color that they “should be second-class citizens.”

Trump Fundraising Petition Asks Supporters If They Stand During National Anthem

“I don’t know how we get past that,” he said.

“But for our country to be where we are now, who took a guy who — I don’t care what anyone says, I’m sure they have other reasons and maybe good reasons for voting for Donald Trump — but I don’t think anybody can deny this guy is openly and brazenly racist and misogynistic and ethnic-centric, and say, ‘That’s OK with us, we’re going to vote for him anyway.’ …

“Martin Luther King said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice.’ I would have believed in that for a long time, but not today. … What we have done to minorities … in this election is despicable. I’m having a hard time dealing with it. This isn’t your normal candidate. I don’t know even know if I have political differences with him. I don’t even know what are his politics. I don’t know, other than to build a wall and ‘I hate people of color, and women are to be treated as sex objects and as servants to men.’ I don’t know how you get past that. I don’t know how you walk into the booth and vote for that.”

» Read the full transcript of his 2016 remarks on the Detroit Free Press

(AP Photo/Steve Dipaola: File)