Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Slams HBO’s Winning Time for ‘Shallowness and Lazy Writing’: ‘Characters Are Crude Stick-Figure Representations’

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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has decried HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty for “shallowness and lazy writing,” particularly hitting at how the series portrayed each character.

Abdul-Jabbar, who is portrayed in the Adam McKay series by actor Solomon Hughes, aired his grievances in a Tuesday Substack post titled, “Winning Time Isn’t Just Deliberately Dishonest, It’s Drearily Dull.”

The NBA star and activist claimed McKay “deliberately avoided facts as if they were an STD” while helming the series, condemning the series creators for replacing “solid facts with flimsy cardboard fictions that don’t go deeper and offer no revealing insights.”

While Abdul-Jabbar took issue with how he was portrayed in the series, his post largely focused on the minimization of other characters.

“I’ll start with the bland characterization. The characters are crude stick-figure representations that resemble real people the way Lego Hans Solo resembles Harrison Ford,” he wrote. “Each character is reduced to a single bold trait as if the writers were afraid anything more complex would tax the viewers’ comprehension.”

Listing off the character’s “single bold trait,” Abdul-Jabbar added, “Jerry Buss is Egomaniac Entrepreneur, Jerry West is Crazed Coach, Magic Johnson is Sexual Simpleton, I’m Pompous Prick.”

He faulted the series for portraying Jeanie Buss, now controlling owner and president of the Lakers, as a “naive daddy’s girl” who simply got the job passed down to her from her father Jerry Buss.

“Jeanie Buss was 17 when her father bought the Lakers, but she didn’t come to work for them until after she’d earned her business management degree from the University of Southern California and been general manager of the Los Angeles Strings, a World Team Tennis franchise,” wrote Abdul-Jabbar.

The NBA legend also took issue with the portrayal of Claire Rothman, who was shown “unbuttoning blouse buttons and flouncing her hair before meeting Jerry Buss.”

Rothman denies that ever happened, prompting Abdul-Jabbar to reason that the scene “reduces her intelligence and competence for a cheap joke—which is probably the kind of misogyny the women had to endure in business and now have to endure from the filmmakers.”

Abdul-Jabbar lamented that Jerry West, who has publicly discussed his struggles with mental health, was reduced to a “Wile E. Coyote cartoon to be laughed at.”

West, played by Jason Clarke, is portrayed as an often intoxicated hothead. The series immediately shows him breaking a golf club out of frustration and later includes a scene where he throws his finals MVP trophy through his office window.

The former Lakers player and coach, often referred as Mr. Clutch, has been staunchly defended following the portrayal, with Arn Tellem, vice chairman of the Detroit Pistons, calling him a “gentle man who prides himself on treating others with grace and compassion.”

As for his own representation in the series, Abdul-Jabbar, who won five NBA Championships with the 1980s Showtime Los Angeles Lakers, was primarily concerned with how the portrayal could impact his charity, the Skyhook Foundation.

“I’ve battled leukemia, heart surgery, cancer, fire, and racism—a negative portrayal of me on a TV show has no effect on me personally. But it does affect others. For example, I never said ‘F—k off’ to the child actor (Ross Harris) in Airplane!, nor have I ever said that to any child,” he wrote, noting that he often works with children as part of the Skyhook Foundation.

He reasoned that viewers of the series would be less likely to support the charity if they viewed him as “verbally abusive to children.”

“The result of using caricatures instead of fully developed characters is that the plot becomes frenetic melodrama, sensationalized invented moments to excite the senses but reveal nothing deeper,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “It’s as if he strung together a bunch of flashing colored lights and told us, ‘This is the spirit of Christmas.'”