Kareem Abdul-Jabbar urges NBA coaches to purge anti-vaxxers from rosters: 'I don't think they're behaving like good teammates'

President Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci aren't the only ones who have grown increasingly frustrated with anti-vaxxers. Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is speaking out as well, urging coaches in the National Basketball Association to drop any player who refuses to get vaccinated for the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Obviously fed up with anti-vaxxers in the NBA, the 74-year-old Abdul-Jabbar — who is known his years with the Los Angeles Lakers and the Milwaukee Bucks — told Rolling Stone, "The NBA should insist that all players and staff are vaccinated or remove them from the team.... There is no room for players who are willing to risk the health and lives of their teammates, the staff and the fans simply because they are unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation or do the necessary research."

Abdul-Jabbar also spoke out during a September 27 appearance on CNN, stressing that anti-vaxxers in the NBA are showing a disregard for the health and safety of their teammates.

The former Lakers/Bucks star told host Don Lemon, "I don't think that they are behaving like good teammates or good citizens. This is a war that we're involved in. And masks and vaccines, they are the weapons that we use to fight this war. When you're not going to be cooperative with that, you're working against the effort to make everybody safe. And we can't have that."

When Lemon asked Abdul-Jabbar to respond to NBA players who are saying that they "shouldn't be told what to do," he responded, "That's fine, but they don't have to do that within the framework of the NBA and put other people at risk. That's what we're talking about here: putting other people at risk. It's not about whether somebody feels macho enough that they're going to go against the COVID virus and not have any vaccination protection…. We should be trying to limit this virus with all the tools that we have at our disposal."