Andrew Wiggins went off for 40 points on the Thunder last night in a lively game that featured 32-year-old interim coach Ryan Saunders getting his first win and Thunder guard Dennis Schröder getting ejected for shoving. Wiggins was asked about Schröder’s ejection after the game, and he either said, “He was getting—he was acting crazy,” or, “He was gay. He was acting crazy.” Those are obviously two very different quotes, and as much as I think he’s mumbling “getting,” the tape is ultimately inconclusive.
After the game, Wiggins maintained that he had said “getting.”
That is a clarification, not an apology, yet the coverage from a variety of outlets of Wiggins’s less-than-decipherable comment has been just as unclear. An ESPN bumper headline reads “Wiggins: Meant no disrespect with ‘gay’ remark,” while the headline on the page reads “Andrew Wiggins: Would never disrespect LGBTQIA community.” In their unbylined post, they twice directly quote Wiggins as calling Schröder “gay.”
An AP article (syndicated by NBA.com and others) was initially headlined “Wolves’ Wiggins apologizes for using gay as derogatory term,” but that was recently changed to “Wolves’ Andrew Wiggins tries to clarify postgame comments.” While the AP deleted their tweet with the original headline, the story still quotes him as saying “gay.”
There’s nothing I can say here that isn’t blindingly obvious; if Wiggins used “gay” as a slur, it’s wrong, and if he didn’t, it’s nothing. It just feels like a pretty irresponsible stretch for any coverage of this to definitively state that one way or the other.