ESPN’s ‘First Take’ Issues Correction on Kendrick Perkins’s Racial Bias Allegation

The former Celtics star and fellow ESPN analyst JJ Redick got into a heated argument on Tuesday’s episode regarding NBA MVP voting.

One day after Kendrick Perkins and JJ Redick were involved in a tense argument during ESPN’s First Take, the show issued a correction Wednesday after Perkins alleged that NBA MVP voters have a racial bias toward white players, specifically Nikola Jokić.

On Wednesday’s First Take episode, host Molly Qerim read the correction statement regarding a statistic that Perkins used in his argument.

“I want to correct something here from yesterday’s show, when Kendrick Perkins said that 80% of NBA voters for the MVP award are white,” Qerim said. “The NBA publicly announces the voters each year, and after review, it is clear that the panel is much more diverse than what was portrayed by Kendrick Perkins, and we wanted to make sure that we corrected that today.”

I hope Kendrick Perkins apologizes for implying that there's racial bias in NBA MVP voting based on the misinformation he claimed as "facts" yesterday. First Take correcting him publicly is a good step, but the damage done is irreversible at this point. pic.twitter.com/3gV3aGjgRg

— WADE 🏀 (@Its_Wade) March 8, 2023

During Tuesday’s argument on the show, Redick claimed that Perkins argued that the white NBA MVP voters were “racist” and that they “favor white people.” Perkins shook his head during Redick’s statement, but then Perkins said he had “stated the facts.”