Enes Kanter Will Not Be Traveling With The Knicks To London Because He Is Scared He Could Get Killed By Turkish Spies For Feuding With Turkey's President
I’ll admit I don’t know much about Turkey, but I’m pretty sure from the few stories I catch on the news, it’s a government that you don’t want to fuck with. And Enes Kanter has done what Enes Kanter does, which is talk shit to people he doesn’t like on Twitter, which clearly includes the Turkish President.
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As well as Turkey’s Golden Boy in basketball, Hedo Turkoglu:
And “all” that has come out of it was the threat of a 4+ year jail sentence if/when Kanter returns to Turkey.
Turkey’s state-run news agency says prosecutors are seeking more than four years in prison for Knicks center Enes Kanter on charges of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Anadolu Agency says an indictment prepared by the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office accuses the New York Knicks player of insulting the president in a series of tweets he posted in May and June 2016. Kanter, who is in the United States, would be tried in absentia. The player is a vocal supporter of Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based cleric blamed by Turkey for last year’s failed military coup.
However going overseas, potentially having his passport fucked with again, or potentially getting kidnapped/killed is where Enes draws the line and I can’t blame him. Sure this will probably cause Peter King to remove Kanter from his All-Pro ballot. But Twitter fingers can turn into trigger fingers when you have upset a foreign government that some (most?) people view as a dictatorship and has a crescent moon on their flag. Flags with crescent moons or weapons of any sort always scare the shit out of me for some reason. Risking life and limb for a January game against the fucking Wizards in England is definitely not worth putting your life at stake, especially when you have made it a habit to calling the President of that unstable country the Hitler of the 2000s. I usually roll my eyes at Kanter’s Twitter beefs, especially with the team he willingly took $18 million from this offseason and has a problem with them benching him because I bring the same amount of defensive presence on pick and rolls. But fucking with the Turkish government is flat out loco in my eyes. Stay home Enes, enjoy the city for a few days, and resume “protecting” the paint for a team that should be zeroing in on Zion Williamson over the next 4 months.