Sources: NBA players agree to continue playing, resume postseason – The Athletic
What Changed?
“Persuasion and real talk,” said someone in the meetings.
His frustration, per sources both in and outside of his camp, was not with those who wanted to to continue to play; it was with the lack of a plan going forward after the Bucks caught most of their playing brethren off guard with their decision to walk out Wednesday. The Lakers’ team vote Wednesday night, per a source, was not unanimous; some players wanted to keep playing, while others wanted to walk. And, as ever, people then looked to James.
“‘They’re going with whatever you (James) want to do,’” a source said. “‘Do you want to play or do you not want to play?’” And that’s when James figuratively said ‘let me sleep on it,’ and left the meeting, only to continue the discussion into the night.
That included the ongoing discussions with James. “He wants to play,” one source with knowledge of his thinking said Thursday.
When Paul and Iguodala came to the Thursday morning meeting, their marching orders were different than they’d been Wednesday night. They weren’t going to open the floor for unending discussions. This would be much more top-down leadership, with Paul telling his constituents, this is what we have to do.
“‘The first thing is, we have to play,’” a source who spoke with Paul Thursday said.
LeBron Speaks, and the NBA Follows | Bleacher Report
But the “shut up and dribble” era is over.
Today’s players are emboldened by each other’s voices, by a commissioner who overtly supports their activism—and by the NBA legend who still walks and dribbles among them and who declared, unequivocally, he was more than an athlete.
LeBron James did not birth this modern NBA movement, but he fostered it, nurtured it and created a safe space for his peers by speaking out: on Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Eric Garner in 2014, with a speech at the ESPYs in 2016 and with a pointed barb at President Donald Trump in 2017.
“When you have the main person in the sport speaking out, it tells everyone else that they don’t have to be afraid and can speak out, too,” said Etan Thomas, a former NBA player, activist and author of the book We Matter: Athletes and Activism. Seeing James take a stand, he said, sends a powerful message to every other player: “I can do it as well.”
“That’s why him doing that is so important,” Thomas said, “because he’s inspiring so many guys.”
James will soon resume his pursuit of a fourth championship, at the NBA’s “bubble” campus near Orlando, Florida. His Los Angeles Lakers are among the favorites to win it all.
Whether James claims the trophy or not, this year might already be the most impactful of his long and storied career.
Last month, he joined other athletes and entertainers in launching More Than a Vote, a nonprofit aimed at registering voters and combating voter suppression, especially in Black communities, ahead of the November election.
“I’m inspired by the likes of Muhammad Ali,” James told the New York Times after announcing the initiative. “I’m inspired by the Bill Russells and the Kareem Abdul-Jabbars, the Oscar Robertsons—those guys who stood when the times were even way worse than they are today.”
Now it is James who is doing the inspiring. An entire generation has grown up watching him dominate the NBA, while witnessing the steady growth of player activism he’s championed.
“We will definitely not shut up and dribble,” James declared in February 2018, responding to a tirade from Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “… I mean too much to society, too much to the youth, too much to so many kids who feel like they don’t have a way out.”
Milwaukee Bucks guard Sterling Brown is suing the city of Milwaukee after a 2018 incident in which police officers used a Taser on him while he was awaiting a parking citation. Brown was never charged with a crime, and he rejected the city’s offered settlement of $400,000.
After Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri was physically accosted by a courtside police officer following the Raptors’ 2019 NBA championship win, body-cam footage of the altercation proved that Ujiri had not provoked the incident (as the police contended) but, in fact, had defended himself.
In 2015, after the NYPD fractured the tibia of NBA veteran Thabo Sefolosha as he stood on the sidewalk outside a nightclub, the police attempted to claim that Sefolosha was to blame; he later settled a lawsuit against the city for $4 million.
It’s no wonder that after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, members of the Miami Heat posted photos of themselves wearing hoodies. It’s no wonder that after the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in July 2016, the Minnesota Lynx sparked protests that rolled through the WNBA. When Colin Kaepernick took a knee on Aug. 26, 2016, WNBA players joined his protest that fall. Black athletes, particularly NBA and WNBA players, have been reciting the names of people we’ve lost in our communities; they’ve been doing the work. They’ve been telling us; they’ve been telling you.
And that is the point of the players’ refusal to play. There is certainly an element of solidarity with Black people, but largely this isn’t about us. I don’t need LeBron or Nneka Ogwumike to tell me that racism is a problem in this country.
This is a message to white people who love sports, who love hip-hop and R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, who consume Black performance for entertainment but struggle to say that our lives matter.
Let’s be honest. LeBron, 35, has the most to lose. The clock is ticking on his legendary career.
Most honestly believe that this is LeBron’s best, last chance to win another championship, which would be his fourth.
After all, this is season 17 in his career. And despite having a tremendous regular season, no one can predict how well he will be able to play next season and beyond.
Of all the players that would want to stick it out and play the postseason to its conclusion, James would have to be first on the list.
This is a huge reversal for James. Don’t forget. Before players actually entered The Bubble to avoid COVID-19 and finish the season, there were players against going.
And it just wasn’t about being isolated from loved ones during a dire time in our country.
Many simply didn’t want to take away from the focus and the fight that was playing out all over America. Protests were going strong to fight police brutality and racial injustice. Many had taken to the streets.
The reality of Black pain is breaking American sports’ status quo – ESPN
It is through this lens, the exhausted lens of accumulation, heard in the emotional weariness of Clippers coach Doc Rivers’ voice, and the quavering sadness of TNT’s Chris Webber and the tearful, broken faces of the Washington Mystics where the actionable choice was not to play.
The most powerful corporations in this country have said these routine encounters have become unacceptable, thus it is not an embarrassment for the leagues that the players chose not to play, but wholly appropriate, an exacting of the promise. The message players sent was not that point guards are now moonlighting as legislators, but literally, their humanity must come first — that these Black lives literally matter.
In the weeks of the reckoning since the death of George Floyd, a sneaking belief grew in prominence that the moment had become co-opted, performative, corporatized. The image of Jacob Blake being shot seven times in the back provided a reminder that this is not a branding opportunity.
The result is a group of predominantly Black men and women who have decided to tie the rhetoric into a primary demand: They will be allowed to be admired for their wondrous athletic gifts, but accompanying those gifts is their humanity. They do not exist solely for the entertainment of the public, especially a white public that often seems to thrive on diminishing Black pain. As a job, yes, the players provide entertainment. As people, no. This is the bargain. The accumulation of what is happening to Black people in this country is real, coming at a real cost. The pain is real. The responsibility is real.
And within those realities, the players’ refusal to play has changed the deal. Unlike 2014 and the years that followed, the players have sent a message: For a public that expects performance while being indifferent or hostile to the bodies that live inside the jerseys, they will be seen in full dimension, or, sometimes, not at all.
Colliding Contradictions Crack the NBA’s Political Facade – The Ringer
The collision of the coronavirus pandemic, the quarantine bubble, and the summer of police violence and mass protest took the contradictions inherent in the league’s political stance to a breaking point. Even before players entered the bubble, there were some who thought it would be better not to play. As life inside the bubble ground on week after week, the solutions that enabled the restart—the social-justice messages on the backs of jerseys, the coordinated kneeling during the national anthem—no longer seemed as powerful as had been hoped, because they were so clearly enfolded within the triangulations of the league’s profit logic: How much can we do without seeming to do too much? Where is the line that will make the largest number of players happy while alienating the fewest fans? They seemed focus-grouped. They seemed a little safe. Conservatives who already hated the NBA used the justice branding to drum up rage clicks, but eventually the emphasis of the season drifted away from protest and back to the games. (The games have been fantastic because NBA players are very, very good at their jobs.) Players complained that telecasts weren’t even showing them kneeling during the anthem; the cameras were cutting away.
In contrast to the official protest imagery the NBA allowed within the bubble, what was most stunning about the Bucks’ wildcat strike was its abruptness, its unsanctioned immediacy. The Bucks weren’t consulting with PR experts. They weren’t asking for permission or building consensus. They were just people who were hurting, and George Hill started talking about not playing, and as a team, they decided to take a stand.
In one stroke, the Bucks’ action clarified the limits of the NBA’s official-corporate-messaging approach to supporting Black Lives Matter. What the Bucks did felt powerful because they were breaking a rule: They were putting something on the line and were prepared to sacrifice something. The gesture wasn’t careful or planned; it was disruptive. Instead of being massaged to align with a corporation’s business priorities, it forced everyone who confronted it to face an uncomfortable choice: Do I support this violation of the accepted routine, and if not, what does that say about me? This meant it drew louder howls from the mobs of very sincere Twitter men who very sincerely want to keep all politics out of sports—and not only politics they dislike, how dare you. But that was itself a sign of its power. It forced you to think about the status quo you were supporting by expecting the players to entertain you; if you didn’t want to think about that, of course, you felt threatened.
On Thursday, the day after the Bucks’ strike, the players reportedly agreed to continue the playoffs after a short delay. The missed baseball and soccer games will be rescheduled; Osaka has agreed to play her semifinal in New York. What briefly looked like a widespread shutdown of sports will turn out, at least for now, to be short-lived. The disruption of what passes for normal life these days will be short-lived, too, and that’s fine; athletes deserve to do their jobs and live their lives like anyone else.
What we’ll remember most from a historic week in the NBA – ESPN
How will the events of this week change the NBA and professional sports?
Herring: I don’t know that it has changed things just yet, at least not in the way it would have if they had decided to scrap the season. Activism has always been a part of sports, even if only on an individual scale, like with Kaepernick, Maya Moore, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Craig Hodges. But if the past three months have shown anything, hopefully it’s that, in a league that’s 75% black, we should expect that the faces of it will want to do things to improve the conditions for their people and the communities from which they come.
Now that they recognize their collective power, maybe they’ll seek to use it more often and more powerfully. As uncomfortable as these conversations are, they aren’t new for many of the players — they’re simply new to those who either weren’t aware, haven’t paid attention or haven’t cared about these issues before. That’s arguably all the more reason to have these issues front and center.
What’s next?
This moment is certainly unprecedented, and it will be written in history books and taught in classes decades from now, but how can athletes truly transform this moment from simply being a factoid “Hey, remember that time … ?” to actually being impactful?
The NBA will not have any games on Thursday, but the players did decide to resume the playoffs and it’s likely the other leagues will follow suit in a similar fashion with their respective seasons.
ESPN’s Malika Andrews reported that the players decided to keep playing so they can continue to keep the focus on the movement, while the spotlight is upon them, and integrate their message into games and press conferences.
So where does that leave us?
The walkouts led by the players are admirable: We see the rightful pain and frustration that so many across the sports world have when it comes to issues involving systemic racism. But let’s be real with ourselves, these protests alone do not matter. They are simply thoughtful gestures at best if no tangible action is produced from them.
