Jason Collins Died After a Brief Battle With a Deadly Disease — All the Details

The NBA world shed quite a few tears in mid-May 2026 after news broke of the passing of former player Jason Collins. Collins was the league’s first openly gay athlete, paving the way for others to come forward and live authentically.

The Washington Wizards confirmed Collins’s passing on May 12, 2026, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of former Wizard Jason Collins … and are sending our condolences to his family & loved ones.”

Collins was only 47 years old, born in 1978, and still had plenty of life left ahead of him. So what is the reason his life was cut short at such a young age?

Jason Collins died in May 2026, after a short battle with brain cancer, specifically glioblastoma. Collins revealed in December 2025 that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, “one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer,” in an essay penned for ESPN.

At the time, he explained that the disease came on “incredibly fast,” just months after he married his husband, Brunson Green, in May 2025. He said he had begun to experience unusual and concerning symptoms.

In August 2025, Collins noticed he was unable to focus long enough for him to pack for a flight to the U.S. Open, an event he said he attended every year.

In fact, he and his husband missed their flight, which is when he knew “something was really wrong.” He decided to undergo a CT scan at UCLA, and within minutes, he was pulled out of the machine and told he would need to see a specialist.

Over the next few weeks, his symptoms only got worse. He described his condition like Dory from Finding Nemo, you know, the confused blue fish who forgets everything she’s been told within seconds. But it was during that time that Collins and his family learned what was causing the symptoms, and it wasn’t good.

In his ESPN essay, he explained that the form of glioblastoma was “multiforme,” describing it as “a monster with tentacles spreading across the underside of my brain the width of a baseball.”

He also explained that this type of brain cancer is “so dangerous” because “it grows within a very finite, contained space — the skull — and it's very aggressive and can expand. What makes it so difficult to treat in my case is that it's surrounded by the brain and is encroaching upon the frontal lobe — which is what makes you, "you.”

Despite how aggressive the brain cancer was, Collins sought treatment for it in Singapore. In January 2026, he shared an update on Instagram saying that “everything is going well.” He also shared that he had undergone chemotherapy after September 2025, and an MRI showed that the tumor had shrunk.

It was after that that he decided to then travel to Singapore, where he received a stronger chemotherapy treatment that targets the tumor site. He also noted there was significant necrosis within the tumor, which signaled that the treatment was effective in some way.

In that video, Collins also shared that he planned to return to the U.S. in late January 2026 to attend a cancer conference in New York. While his update offered a glimmer of hope at the time, just a few months later, in May 2026, news of his death broke, revealing just how aggressive the disease was.