What’s going on with Ye’s Donda Academy basketball team? Head coach Dorell Wright, a former NBA player, is a sitting duck as he watches players leave and games get cancelled

Nov 14 , 2022

Kanye West aka Ye’s Donda Academy basketball team is teetering on the brink of collapse. Photos: Slam, AFP

Kanye West’s aka Ye’s recent anti-Semitic comments on social media have caused Adidas, Gap and the talent agency CAA, among others to cut ties with the rapper

The producer’s K-12 school Donda Academy’s basketball team remains but a slew of criticisms are surfacing as it undergoes a huge change in its roster of players

There was no sign of Kanye West here recently.

Or the rappers, producers and models once on the scene with the basketball team from Donda Academy, the private school started last year by the hip hop artist also known as Ye.

Ye and the Donda Academy basketball team on a Slam Magazine cover. Photo: Slam

“Our kids were being sucked in by the lifestyle of the rich and the famous,” said Kenny Hooks, whose son, Jalen, played for Donda Academy last season. “They were around stars all the time.”

But that was then. This is now. So what’s going on exactly?

Players calling it quits

Miami Heat guard Dorell Wright poses for photos on media day in Miami in 2006. Photo: Reuters

Dorell Wright, presiding over the most beleaguered prep basketball team in the country, stood inside a training facility on November 3, and stared at his phone, as if willing the arrival of good news.

In 2006, Wright won an NBA championship ring while playing for the Miami Heat. He later set pre-Steph Curry three-point records with the Golden State Warriors. After his 11-year career in the NBA ended in 2015, he played in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany and Russia.

Yet nothing prepared him for this. Wright, 36, is head coach of the basketball team at Donda Academy.

After Ye’s recent anti-Semitic comments on social media, Adidas, Gap and the talent agency CAA, among others, cut ties with the rapper. But Ye’s basketball team remains, although it has lost several key players.

That November 3 morning, the team’s top player officially transferred. In the afternoon, the team’s second-best player transferred.