“All these NBA fans, they want to watch the Western Conference Finals, but they can’t all because of me,” Kanter told The Post on Tuesday.
Enes Kanter celebrates Portland's Game 7 win over the Denver Nuggets. By Jacob Bogage Jacob Bogage National sports writer and blogger Email Bio Follow May 14 at 2:21 PM Turkish sports broadcaster S Sport will not air the NBA’s Western Conference finals between the Golden State Warriors and Portland Trail Blazers because of the political stance of Portland center Enes Kanter, a vocal opponent of the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Kanter is a vocal critic of Erdogan’s government for its human rights record, and has aligned himself with exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom the government accuses of orchestrating a failed coup in 2016. Gulen, a permanent U.S. resident, lives in exile in Pennsylvania. “I remember getting all these comments from Turkish people,” he said. “They were so made at me because they couldn’t watch the games. I kept saying, ‘it’s not my fault.’”
“They know if they put my name out there, they could get in trouble or they might even end up in jail,” he said at the time. “That shows it’s a dictatorship. That shows there’s no freedom of speech in Turkey.”Kanter has not returned to Turkey since 2016; upon leaving, the government canceled his passport and attempted to detain him before he could return to the United States. Since, he has called Erdogan, “the Hitler of our century,” and has not left the U.S.
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