Former college hoops coach Bobby Knight has said plenty of stupid things over the years, and on Tuesday morning in an ESPN Radio appearance, Knight added to his regrettably long list of offensive and insensitive remarks. Knight was responding to questions regarding the NBA prospects for Jabari Parker and Andrew Wiggins, following poor performances in the NCAA Tournament. Per the Sporting News:
“If I were involved with the NBA I wouldn’t want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid, to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I’ve been watching on another team and now he’s 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid. On top of it all, the NBA does a tremendous, gigantic disservice to college basketball. It’s as though they’ve raped college basketball in my opinion.
“Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they’ll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I’m sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.”
No follow-up question was asked regarding Knight’s comment.
This isn’t Knight’s first run-in with casually using the word rape. In a 1988 interview, Knight, when asked how to handle stress, told Connie Chung, “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”
