VIDEO: Sue Bird Responds To Draymond Green’s Tweets About Women’s Pay

Olympic Basketball star Sue Bird had a lot to say about Draymond Green’s controversial tweets about compensation in women’s sports.

During the Team USA Tokyo Olympics Media Summit with fellow WNBA stars A’ja Wilson, Nneka Ogwumike and Team USA women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley, Bird spoke about Green’s 12 tweets regarding the pay gap in sports. She also responded to his argument about female athletes having to build better platforms for themselves. It should be noted that Green tagged Bird in one of his tweets.

Green wrote that female athletes should be making “these huge companies commit money to ya’ll cause. That’s empowering! Or don’t yell women empowerment.” Green also said that he had been asked to film Public Service Announcements about women’s empowerment but that he declined because the brands “are not putting their money where their mouth is.”

“I think, simply put, the world, America, our country is catching up to us. We’ve already been here, we’ve already been doing the basketball thing. We’ve already had that product. It’s already been what it is, which is great. I think, in terms of what we stand for in terms of social justice, we’ve been doing this. That’s what I mean when I say the world just caught up with us. They’re just seeing it now, it’s always been there,” said the 40-year-old Bird.

“As it pertains to Draymond, to be honest, the sad part is that he does have a platform. He had every chance to really get in the nuance of this conversation because a lot of these conversations around women’s sports lives in the nuance. There are reasons why the investments are the way it is, the media coverage is the way it is. It’s not as simple as, ‘Oh they don’t have revenue.’ That’s actually the easy way out,” Bird explains.

“So what was unfortunate was that, with all the resources that he does have, he didn’t have those conversations with the people he tagged. He could’ve hit me up, he could’ve hit all of us up. … Because again, his platform allows people to jump on the ‘they don’t have the revenue’ train. That’s just not what it is,” the four-time medalist says.

“I see his points,” Bird said. “His point is: why is company X going to capitalize on talking about women during Women’s History Month but not put the money where the mouth is and support women’s sports or the WNBA or individuals, whatever the case may be. I see his point, he just tagged the wrong people. He should’ve been tagging those companies. He should be having those conversations with the companies who endorse him.”