NEW YORK, N.Y. April 29 (DPI) – NBA veteran Jason Collins announced his gay sexual orientation in a Sports Illustrated online article today, a move treated by some media outlets as akin to Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier.
And while professional athletes and other celebrities tweeted congratulations to Collins, a journeyman center who has averaged 3.6 points per game in 12 seasons, some observers say that coming out now may be a calculated move to extend his career.
(Comment on NYTimes.com) Ah, whatever. It was a no-lose announcement for Collins. He is almost certainly done as an NBA player. Now maybe a team will pick him up for the PR benefit.
Still, good for him for doing it.
(Another comment:) It is indeed courageous, but it’s also very shrewd from a career standpoint: Jason Collins, a journeyman with an astonishingly long career given his limited skills (easily the slowest feet in the league, and I’m a fan), is trying to re-sign and keep playing in the NBA. It seems now he is playing the “sexual-orientation card” as leverage to induce some team to sign him — now, if no team signs him, it will look like, in the eyes of our sensitive media and others, like garden-variety discrimination. Looks like Stanford taught him something!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/sports/basketball/nba-center-jason-collins-comes-out-as-gay.html
The announcement prompted widespread speculation on whether Collins would find another job in the NBA. The NYT’s FiveThirtyEight blog, which analyzes statistics and probabilities, released a remarkably in-depth analysis of Collins’s prospects of remaining in the league: