Getty Mikal Bridges #1 of the Brooklyn Nets.
The Brooklyn Nets have a budding star on their hands in Mikal Bridges and he is acclimating just fine to his new surroundings.
Nets general manager Sean Marks and head coach Jacque Vaughn have both expressed their affinity for the player that Bridges is and what they think he can become as he continues to grow in more of a featured role.
For his part, Bridges has grown quite fond of Nets co-owner Clara Wu Tsai.
Tsai – who, along with her husband and Nets co-owner Joe Tsai, also owns the New York Liberty – was appearing on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ on May 11 to discuss her 2022 documentary titled ‘Unfinished Business’ on the history of the WNBA through a “dual timeline”.
She also discussed her efforts to provide “loans, grants” and “equity investments” into black-owned businesses in Brooklyn.
“Our teams play in Brooklyn. They belong to Brooklyn,” Tsai said. “While I would love nothing more than to bring a championship home to Brooklyn just because of the joy that it brings – it’s incredible what a win can do to lift people’s spirits. I also really believe that it’s important to build the community up.”
Bridges’ tweet was met with resounding agreement among Nets fans that Tsai is indeed beloved.
@mikal_bridges Same for all of #NetsWorld
Clara’s the best,” tweeted @BrooklynNetcast.
Tsai and her husband are renowned for their philanthropy through the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation and numerous other endeavors. However, the opinions of Joe Tsai do not often ring so favorably.
Joe Tsai Blasted Over ‘Difficult’ Comments
During his speech at the BEYOND Expo 2023 on May 10, Tsai compared dealing with the players on the team to working with Hollywood actors during the production of a film, calling them “very difficult”. His goal was to push the pros of artificial intelligence in media creation and brand development.
However, his message was received by some as more of a complaint about control.
Just a fundamental and dangerous misunderstanding of art and how humanity is meant to interface with it. To his ilk, *everything* is an inefficiency waiting to be patched up by automation, very much including the creative process itself. Horrifying!
“Joe Tsai means control not manage,” tweeted @gorgexus.
It should be noted that Tsai had grown “tired” of dealing former Nets star tandem of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, both of whom demanded traded before and during the season, in July of 2022, per Joe Vardon of The Athletic.
Joe Tsai’s Alibaba Under Intense Scrutiny
This is not a new sentiment, either. Tsai’s most fruitful endeavor, the online e-retail giant Alibaba, has come under heavy scrutiny for its role in the rounding up and placement of China’s Muslim population into barbed wire caps, per a report from Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru of ESPN in June of 2022.
Under Tsai’s leadership, Alibaba funded companies that helped China build “an intrusive, omnipresent surveillance state that uses emerging technologies to track individuals with greater efficiency,” according to a 2020 congressional report.
Those technologies have been used widely in the western region of Xinjiang, where the government has forced more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities into barbed-wire “re-education” camps, policies that have been described as cultural “genocide” by the United States, several other countries and human rights organizations.
Tsai has also taken heat from former NBA big man Enes Freedom for this issue and from Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown over Tsai’s comments regarding Irving.
That is quite the contrast from the way his wife is viewed by the fanbase.