Columnist Suggests Basketball Team be Renamed 'New York N——s\

Brooklyn Nets logo.

Phil Mushnik of the New York Post is not too keen on rapper Jay-Z’s newly-branded Brooklyn Nets and he lets his readers know exactly how he feels in his Friday column [emphases added]:

As long as the Nets are allowing Jay-Z to call their marketing shots — what a shock that he chose black and white as the new team colors to stress, as the Nets explained, their new “urban” home — why not have him apply the full Jay-Z treatment?

Why the Brooklyn Nets when they can be the New York N——s? The cheerleaders could be the Brooklyn B—-hes or Hoes. Team logo? A 9 mm with hollow-tip shell casings strewn beneath. Wanna be Jay-Z hip? Then go all the way! [Emphasis added]

Yikes. You know this isn’t going to end well for Mushnik. It wasn’t long before the columnist was being called out for “racially insensitivity.”

“There is so much going wrong at once that it’s a bit overwhelming,’” writes Mediaites Sarah Delvin.

Jay Z wearing the Brooklyn Nets Logo.

“Just…wow. It’s tough to believe that his editors let this slide, as backlash will undoubtedly ensue,” writes the Twitchy team.

"This Phil Mushnick take on Nets/Jay-Z is remarkably ignorant,” Sports Illustrated's Andy Glockner writes.

Delvin provides further analysis:

…maybe particular attention ought to be paid to the phrase “full Jay-Z treatment.” My first guess about what the “full Jay-Z treatment” might mean regarding the Brooklyn Nets might be something along the lines of “courtside seats and maybe a surprise appearance by Beyoncé,” but that’s a bit of a boring interpretation if the goal is to be as racist and out of touch as humanly possible.

However, as the Twitchy team points out, Mushnik was most likely making tongue in cheek references to actual Jay-Z songs that use the “n-word” (and similar obscenities). Furthermore, the writer is “no stranger to taking aim at rappers in his work,” Chris Littmann of Sporting News writes.

New York Post columnist Phil Mushnik.

Still, even if his remarks were meant as a joke or a snarky reference to the rapper’s songs, it was a bad, bad idea.

You know there’s going to be backlash over this.