It’s been a pre-season in an enormous season.
The sports world was founded on Wednesday with a protest from the Milwaukee Bucks, spread after a postponement of the entire league playlate of the evening and then branched out into Major League Baseball, where the Brewers and Reds canceled their regular season game .
Within two hours, the Bucks’ decision to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake on Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin, just south of their hometown of Milwaukee, played out an avalanche of support from across the country – including some of the biggest stars in the game. Suddenly, a complete strike in solidarity was underway when the larger movement for racial justice erupted, prompting fans to wonder if they saw the last of basketball in Orlando this season.
“We are tired of the murders and the injustice,” George Hill of Bucks told The Undefeated.
LeBron James shared strong words of his own in support of the Bucks.
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Game 5 of the Bucks Magic playoff series should tip EST at 4 p.m. But Milwaukee never came up.
Orlando took the floor for warming up pregame, but was not affiliated with the top seed in the Eastern Conference. The Magic left the court around 4 p.m., refused to accept Milwaukee’s loss and returned to their team hotel, and also decided not to play.
The Bucks spent the next hour in their locker room trying to get a visit from Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, who is in charge of overseeing Blake’s case.
Updated on August 26, 2020 at 7:55 pm: When the Bucks players came out of their locker room hours later, they issued a statement calling on the officers involved in Blake’s shooting to be “held accountable.”
“Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today may not be on basketball,” the players said. “If we take the court and represent Milwaukee and Wisconsin, we are expected to play at a high level, give maximum effort and hold each other accountable. We adhere to that standard, and at the moment we demand the same from our legislators and legal acts. “
In a post on social media, Alex Lasry, the Bucks senior vice president and son of co-owner Marc Lasry, endorsed the players’ decision to strike.
“The position taken today by the players and the org shows that we are satisfied. Enough is enough. Change must happen, ”he wrote.
Milwaukee is 40 miles north of Kenosha, Wisconsin, the site where Blake was shot seven times by local police who left him paralyzed.
Bucks head coach Mike Budenholzer spoke to the press yesterday about the shooting. Folle other athletes and coaches have also shared their reactions to the horrific shooting.
The Raptors and Celtics were the first NBA teams to consider a strike. Now it looks like the rest of the NBA will also consider a boycott of their game tomorrow. Both games between the Rockets and Thunder, and Lakers and Trail Blazers have been postponed and will be relocated, according to the NBA.
Every player in the bubble is invited to talk tonight at 8pm to determine how the league goes on. Or, perhaps, cancel the season altogether.
Within an hour of the announcement of the strike, all other NBA teams decided to skip tonight’s scheduled games. In its statement, the league said all Game 5s would be replayed – but that assumes players are playing entirely within them. It remained unclear what the long-term ramifications of the day’s events would be.
The Undefeated’s Marc J Spears said he believes players are asking themselves, “whether they should be [in the bubble] or not. ”
According to ESPN ‘Adrian Wojnarowski, the NBA Board of Governors will meet tomorrow, likely to discuss the future of the NBA Bubble.
Other teams and athletes outside the NBA will also be striking.
Tennis champion Naomi Osaka, whose father is Haitian and mother Japanese, but has lived in the US since her three, took to Twitter to announce that she would not be participating in the semi final of de Western & Southern Open say Thursday “Continued genocide of Black of people at the hands of police makes me honestly sick to my stomach. Osaka posted its statement in English and Japanese.
The WNBA, which had first announced the three-game schedule, later decided to postpone its schedule.
The Milwaukee Brewers and Cincinnati Reds will not play their game this evening. Jason Heyward of the Puppies decided to sit down his game last night in support of the move. And the Seattle Mariners, who have the most Black players on any MLB team on their roster – including Dee Gordon, Mallex Smith, Carl Edwards Jr. and Justin Dunn – voted unanimously not to play their game with the Padres. The Giants-Dodgers game was also canceled, according to reports.
Professional sports teams hitting in response to persistent racism is historically unpredictable.
These athletes are not here to play games, literally and figuratively.
Today’s news also comes on the fourth anniversary of the first demonstration on the field by Colin Kaepernick in a football match.
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