Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Criticizes ‘Winning Time’ as Boring, ‘Deliberately Dishonest’

Since its premiere on March 6, much has been made about the historical accuracy of HBO’s new series, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. Criticism has been levied about the portrayal of Jerry West and the overall faithfulness (or lack thereof) to how the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s actually came together.

Count the NBA’s all-time leading scorer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar among the disapproving crowd.

Abdul-Jabbar offered a lengthy review of the show on his Substack on Tuesday, criticizing the series for being inaccurate and boring, describing the latter as an “immutable sin” that is committed by the show “over and over.”

“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,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “Each character is reduced to a single bold trait as if the writers were afraid anything more complex would tax the viewers’ comprehension. Jerry Buss is Egomaniac Entrepreneur, Jerry West is Crazed Coach, Magic Johnson is Sexual Simpleton, I’m Pompous Prick. They are caricatures, not characters.”

Abdul-Jabbar also derided the show for lacking humor, and did not find the frequent convention of characters breaking the fourth wall to be insightful or funny, concluding: “It never held my interest enough for me to care, let alone be outraged.”

As far as the accuracy of the show is concerned, Abdul-Jabbar acknowledged that writers often take certain liberties to more effectively drive home the themes or larger ideas of their stories, even if they are based on or depicting real-life events. Still, he lambasts the show’s creators, saying that they “deliberately avoided facts as if they were an STD.” In particular, he took issue with how current Lakers president Jeanie Buss is portrayed as a “naive daddy’s girl” at the beginning of the show.

“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,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “She wasn’t the naive daddy’s girl portrayed in the first few episodes. Making her a girl-child belittles her early achievements on her own.”

Abdul-Jabbar writes that the way his “aloofness” is portrayed early in the series—with him telling a child fan to “F— off” when asked to take a picture—is also inaccurate, and laments that that image could hurt his local children’s foundations in the long run. He concludes his scathing review by highlighting what an impactful era the 1980s Lakers represented, and how regretful he is that the HBO show has not done justice to what was a singularly historical time period.

“Yeah, there’s an amazing, compelling, culturally insightful story in there,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “Winning Time just ain’t that story.”

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