NBA players didn’t come to Disney solely for a restart. They also wanted social reform.
The Milwaukee Bucks showed how far they’re willing to go to get it by opting not to play in their playoff game Wednesday following yet another shooting of a Black man by a white police officer. Players refused to leave their locker room for the game against the Orlando Magic, demanding that lawmakers act to address police brutality and racial injustice. Two more games were postponed later in the day, the second time this season NBA basketball came to an immediate halt.
Other sports followed, just as they did in March when the season was suspended for four months because of the coronavirus pandemic. This time it wasn’t due to the virus, it was the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The urgency of their message isn’t always heard.
Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff said Thursday that NBA protests are “absurd and silly.”
“If they want to protest, I don’t think we care,” Marc Short said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“I don’t know that you are going to see the administration weigh in one way or the other. In my mind it’s absurd and silly,” Short said.
President Donald Trump did weigh in, criticizing the league and its players.
“They’ve become like a political organization, and that’s not a good thing,” Trump told reporters Thursday, noting that the league's ratings are down from previous seasons. “I don’t think that’s a good thing for sports or for the country.”
But it wasn’t just the NBA calling off games. By Thursday, players and teams from most professional sports, including baseball, the WNBA, MLS and tennis, either stopped competing or practicing. The NHL was considering its response after Hockey Diversity Alliance called on the mostly-white league to postpone its playoff games.
In the NFL, multiple teams, including the Arizona Cardinals, Chicago Bears, Denver Broncos, Green Bay Packers, Indianapolis Colts, New York Jets, Tennessee Titans and Washington Football Team, all chose to not practice Thursday.
Individual players and coaches across all sports are trying to communicate directly to the public like never before.
“The biggest thing that we all understand is if we’re not playing, what are we doing? What are we doing to show and to help what’s going on outside this bubble?” Boston Celtics forward Grant Williams said, shortly before the Bucks were scheduled to tip off their game against the Orlando Magic.
The Western & Southern Open wouldn’t be played Thursday, with the U.S. Tennis Association announcing play would be paused after two-time Grand Slam women’s champion Naomi Osaka had already said she wouldn’t play her semifinal match.
“I don’t expect anything drastic to happen with me not playing, but if I can get a conversation started in a majority white sport I consider that a step in the right direction,” Osaka tweeted. “Watching the continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police is honestly making me sick to my stomach.”
Before coming to Disney, many NBA players wrestled for weeks about whether it was even right to play, fearing that a return to games would take attention off the deaths of, among others, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in recent months.
They ultimately decided coming to the bubble and playing televised games would give them the largest platform, though now at least some are wondering if that’s still true. Toronto coach Nick Nurse said he’s heard some players on his team say they were thinking about going home.
Clippers coach Doc Rivers hopes they won’t.
His players considered boycotting a playoff game in 2014 after audio tapes featuring former owner Donald Sterling were revealed. He said this time is different because it’s the whole league, rather than one team, weighing the decision.
“I think every team has to decide what they want to do and honestly I hope everyone plays,” Rivers said. “I just think showing the excellence in doing your job, there’s nothing wrong with that, but also fighting for what’s right is important as well.”
It certainly is for the Bucks, who play about 40 miles from Kenosha. Sterling Brown, one of the players to read the statement, has a federal lawsuit pending against the city of Milwaukee alleging he was targeted because he was Black and that his civil rights were violated in January 2018 when officers used a stun gun on him after a parking violation.
And it is for the Raptors, whose team president, Masai Ujiri, had an altercation with an Oracle Arena security guard after Game 6 of last year’s NBA Finals. A video of it released recently appears to show an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy initially shoved Ujiri, who is Black, twice.
They are scheduled to open the second round Thursday against Boston, but Nurse said his players were already having discussions about not playing.
“Boycotting the game has come up for them and again, as a way to try to demand a little more action and I think that’s really what they want,” Nurse said.
“I think there’s enough attention and there’s not quite enough action and I think that’s what I can sense from the discussion. Their disappointment of man, how can we get something to change?”
It probably starts with actions like the Bucks took. Rivers and LeBron James had passionately described the emotions the NBA community felt after seeing the video of Blake’s shooting.
But it’s going to take more than athletes sitting out games.
“It’s going to take all our institutions to stand up for our values,” former President Barack Obama tweeted, commending the NBA and WNBA players while posting a link to Rivers’ comments from earlier this week.
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