While Jacob Blake was added to the long list of blacks that law enforcement has brutalized, it has become clear to NBA players that previous social justice appeals for the Florida bubble were not enough.
This man!!!! WE’RE ASKING FOR CHANGE. SICK OF THAT
Wednesday afternoon began what will be one of the most vital days in the history of athletes’ activism, as Milwaukee Bucks players refused to leave the locker room to speak for the fifth game of their first-round series against the Orlando Magic. The resolution was not to play the game, a playoff game with genuine bets for the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. For what? Another act of police violence against a black man, this time in his own garden in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Now the season is in grave danger. Shams Charania of The Athletic and Stadium reported that the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers voted not to play the rest of the playoffs while the remaining 11 groups sought to continue, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski noted that it was more of a ballot than a final. vote. Array
Once again, NBA players have become America’s mirror. Thursday’s emergency board assembly will show whether genuine NBA force agents see what players see: an ugliness that can’t have been avoided and a growing desire for change.
NBA players potentially risk millions of dollars if the season doesn’t resume. Some of the biggest stars in the league may take on that threat; some in the lower ranks can’t. However, it is a threat that possibly everyone would have to assume because what is at stake is too much for the long term of the country and for its humanity as predominantly black men.
Shortly after the Bucks’ strike, players from the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder did the same. The NBA temporarily announced that All Three games on Wednesday would be postponed, which is not entirely accurate. It was a player-motivated resolution that took the league’s workplace by surprise.
By the end of the night, the WNBA, tennis star Naomi Osaka and several baseball players (including the Milwaukee Brewers) had joined what amounted to a general professional sports strike.
But come back earlier in the week when players started taking public positions. Players such as Donovan Mitchell of the Utah Jazz and Pascal Siakam of the Toronto Raptors expressed that they agreed to resume the season in the first place.
The kind of radical thinking and the admirable but unattainable proposals you expect from the margins of NBA Twitter came here from the players.
Soon, we saw reports that Raptors players were not playing in the first game of their second-round playoff series, which is scheduled to begin on Thursday.
It’s too early to say whether the strike will end the season or whether the matches will resume in a few days. No actor has the ghost that leaving will oppose America’s centuries-old legacy of institutionalized racism.
But the players tried all the other odds to create the desperately needed replacement, and nothing else worked. So they make the biggest to date, one that will be very unlikely to be forgotten and that will be written in the history books.
Wednesday’s occasions were a logical extension of a reboot that had deeply dubious players, either for security considerations surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and whether returning to the game after more widespread civil rights protests in U.S. history would damage more problems.
The NBA and NBPA nevertheless agreed to safe situations for players to portray again and for the league to recover some of the profit that was decimated by the pandemic. Some of the social justice projects were on the surface: they portray “Black Lives Matter” on the 3 courts of Disney’s Wide World of Sports and the list of slogans players could place on the back of their jerseys.
Others were more important, such as the league and its 30 groups that recently committed $300 million to the economic empowerment of black communities.
The NBA also agreed not to comply with its long-standing rule that requires players to show up for the national anthem, and the first few days of the reboot saw demonstrations of high-level groups that made everyone feel smart by participating in the reboot. .
Players made their paintings on those parameters and made changes.
Some players, such as Tobias Harris of the Philadelphia 76ers and Jerami Grant of the Denver Nuggets, made calls to the media to answer questions about Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old black woman killed by police in Louisville in March.
Most players chose a slogan from the NBA list, and many used their media time to choose.
They have spoken on social media, whether it’s about express victims of police brutality (Taylor, George Floyd, Elijah McClain and now Blake, among many others) and about bigger social issues that want to be solved. Almost every day, a player or coach made a passionate call for a replacement that was informed, tweeted and shared on social media.