The NBA has shown in the recent past that it is willing to discipline players just for tarnishing its brand. So the league’s remarkably passive stance on Josh Giddey, a 21-year-old Oklahoma City Thunder guard, seems strangely out of place.
Giddey is still playing. But he is under separate investigations by the league and by police in Newport Beach, California, amid suspicion that he had intimate contact with an underage girl in 2021.
“I can’t think of many circumstances where we’ve suspended a player based on an allegation alone,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last week on ESPN’s daily show NBA Today. “In this case, we have an allegation, a police investigation, and a parallel NBA investigation. Where there is a criminal investigation, we take a back seat.” The immediate effect of this approach has been that Giddey, who has not been criminally charged and has declined to comment on the issue, gets to keep playing while his case is adjudicated.
That unsettles a number of fans; in recent weeks, as the Thunder visited Minnesota, Houston, and Dallas, Giddey was greeted with boos. The league’s cautious approach has also raised doubts about the fundamental fairness of the way the NBA disciplines its athletes. Giddey is white, whereas a number of players who have faced much swifter punishment for alleged offenses outside the sport are Black.
One such player is Kevin Porter Jr., formerly a guard with the Houston Rockets. He was arrested in September and charged with assaulting his girlfriend, the former WNBA player Kysre Gondrezick, at a New York City hotel. The Rockets banned Porter from all team activities before trading him to Oklahoma City in October. The Thunder waived Porter immediately. Gondrezick has since denied that he assaulted her. Prosecutors have dropped one of the charges against Porter, but he still faces two others. He has pleaded not guilty.
The accusations against Giddey first surfaced in late November, in an anonymous social-media post that included videos and photos of a man who appeared to be Giddey alongside a girl who was said to be under 18—the age of consent in California. Citing an anonymous source, the Los Angeles Times later reported that the teen is a high-school student in Orange County. Some news accounts indicate that she is refusing to cooperate with the police.
Waiting for a completed police investigation before responding seems, on its face, like a sensible and fair approach for a league to take. In practice, the NBA’s response to player misconduct is far more subjective. The league and its teams routinely make disciplinary decisions without waiting for the criminal-justice system. The Memphis Grizzlies superstar Ja Morant is scheduled to return to NBA action next week, after an unpaid 25-game suspension for displaying firearms irresponsibly multiple times on social media. Earlier this year, the league suspended him for eight games for a similar offense. Morant has never been charged or seriously investigated by the criminal-justice system for such behavior.
The punishment was appropriate: On one livestream, Morant waved a gun while riding in a car with a friend. On another, Morant brandished a gun while appearing intoxicated in a nightclub. When one of the NBA’s biggest stars is flaunting firearms, it reflects badly on the entire league.
The NBA has every right to defend its image. The Brooklyn Nets suspended the guard Kyrie Irving after he posted a link to a film that featured anti-Semitic tropes and minimized the Holocaust. Both the Morant and Irving situations required a swift and decisive response.
Fair or not, the league’s history of punishing certain offenses quickly makes the lack of action against Giddey seem more suspicious. Some commentators believe that Giddey is benefiting from a double standard. “It kind of pisses me off because of the Kevin Porter Jr. situation,” the former NBA athlete Rashad McCants said recently on No Chill, a podcast hosted by Gilbert Arenas, another former pro basketball player. McCants went on to say that Porter’s “career could be over because of an ‘alleged,’ right? Josh Giddey got to play. Josh Giddey ain’t being pushed all over the internet like this is a problem, like the Kevin Porter Jr. shit was.”
After Porter’s arrest, the Rockets and the Thunder immediately distanced themselves from him—as they should have. But Oklahoma City has chosen to keep playing Giddey while he’s under dual investigations. “No change in status from a basketball standpoint,” the Oklahoma City coach Mark Daigneault said last month when asked about the guard.
Giddey, McCants maintained, plays for an organization that protects him. By contrast, Porter was treated more harshly because he had a more contentious relationship with the teams he played for.
The Thunder had the option of keeping Giddey on the bench or away from the team while his case is sorted out. That might seem harsh, given that the allegations against the Thunder star are still unproven. But the NBA isn’t a court of law. And as a matter of deterrence, the league must do what it can to show that it takes allegations of violence against women—and the sexual exploitation of women—seriously.
Optics matter, and right now the NBA is looking awfully inconsistent.