“Trading Baskets” is a weekly NBA column written by Reagan Griffin Jr. and Eddie Sun. The writers “hand off” each week’s installment, continuing an ongoing dialogue to challenge the way fans think about basketball. Click here to read last week’s edition.
The spirit of this column series is a response to the previous installment, but I’m going to do a bit of a 180-degree turn this week. There are bigger things than basketball at play right now.
This week, we witnessed yet another brutal attack of an unarmed Black person. On Sunday, Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by officer Rusten Sheskey, paralyzing him from the waist down.
In response, the Milwaukee Bucks elected to forgo their Wednesday afternoon playoff game against the Orlando Magic. Domino after domino quickly fell, with NFL teams canceling practices and MLB teams postponing games, and soon it appeared that the sports world would grind to a screeching halt in protest of racial injustice.
For a brief moment, it appeared that we might be in the center of the most revolutionary moment in sports history. But just as quickly as things heated up, they cooled right back down.
In a meeting the morning after the Bucks-Magic game was supposed to be played, the NBA players decided to finish what they had started in the bubble: the playoffs would go on. NFL teams returned to training camp practice. The MLB played double-headers to make up for the hitch in the schedule. In a matter of hours, sports went right back to the way they were.
For me, it was a bit disappointing, though I do understand. There are CBA ramifications, salary camp concerns and players want to compete — it’s what they’ve worked their entire lives for. However, even if nothing substantial has come out of this particular moment, a message has been sent to the leadership in this country that will undoubtedly have a strong long-term impact.
Kneeling is no longer enough.
When Colin Kaepernick took a knee, he pushed the envelope. He challenged the ideology of the time and forced America to reexamine its priorities. It was controversial, as real protest should be. Never in the history of this country, of the world, have the cries of the oppressed been welcomed in open arms by the oppressor. The second that protest becomes a comfortable process, it is no longer protest — it is a performance.
When the players initially returned from the COVID-hiatus, they did so under the premise that social justice efforts and sports could coexist. I believed this would be the case as well.
However, over the course of these playoffs, it has been abundantly clear that these watered-down displays of solidarity and commercialized symbolic gestures accomplish little to nothing in effecting the change that we need to see. The commercials, the kneeling, the couple of seconds every interview dedicated to discussing these issues before jumping right back into basketball, they’re not moving the needle. It’s great that the NBA leadership is willing to support the players in their social justice efforts, but that simply isn’t enough.
Because, truth be told, the NBA leadership is part of the problem.
It is no longer enough for NBA owners to merely “stand with” the players while they do the grunt work – honestly, it never has been. So long as these billionaires stand idly by and clap while the players fight the good fight, I am considering them complicit in the issues that plague the Black community, and you should too.
They influence our government officials. They sit in rooms that the rest of the public doesn’t even know about. They can call in the favors. They have the power to change things.
But they won’t. Or at least, they haven’t. The owners have seemed perfectly content with cashing their checks while leaning back in their chairs with their hands clasped behind their heads, while the players watch their Black brothers and sisters slaughtered in the streets. They likely did feel the need to get up from behind their desks, however, when there was a chance that the checks would stop flowing — that is, when the players threatened to stop playing.
That’s how you get these owners to act. And although this particular work stoppage was short-lived due to a lack of planning, you’d better believe that this is not going to be a flash in the pan. The clock is officially ticking for these owners to flex the power that they really have.
Enough with the antics, NBA owners. You’re up.
“Trading Baskets” runs every Friday.
This column was originally named “Dribble Handoff.” The name has since been changed.