The Milwaukee Bucks’ decision not to take the court to their playoff game Wednesday resonated rapidly across the sports world. Her protest against the shooting of a Black man by police, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was joined by other teams in the NBA, as well as three other leagues: WNBA players called out their Wednesday night games; three MLB games were postponed, with the Milwaukee Brewers the first round decide against playing their home game; and five MLS matches were held.
NBA players in the bubble, the Orlando-based hub for the 2020 playoffs (largely shut off from the rest of society to prevent coronavirus infections), hold a meeting late Wednesday to talk about what’s coming right now for the playoffs, if anything. The remaining teams were asked about their first preference, and the Lakers and Clippers voted to end the season. The players will meet again Thursday at 11 a.m. Eastern, according to ESPN’s Malika Andrews and Adrian Wojnarowski, at the same time a meeting of the NBA’s Board of Governors. No NBA games are expected to be played Thursday.
Amid efforts to get sports back on track during the coronavirus pandemic, the Milwaukee-led strike represents the most important act of demonstration during a summer full of athletes blurring the line between sport and politics. The NBA gave Black Lives Matter characters prominent placement on courts in Orlando, and players could put messages on the backs of their jerseys (select from a pre-approved list). But some players were beginning to wonder if the presence of slogans around the broadcasts had really helped the movement, or if the games just served to remove the larger message.
“We would, to be honest, not come to this damn place,” Bucks guard George Hill told reporters Monday. “Here, all the focus points just come down to what the problems are. … We’m playing the bell here to do these things for social justice and all that. To see it all yet and we just play the games like it’s nothing, it’s just a really frustrating situation right now. ”
That such frustrations are at the forefront this week, in the wake of Blake’s shooting, is not surprising. But that they would lead to a mass strike is historic. A few members of the Boston Celtics released an exhibition play in 1961 about the racist treatment of Black players in the team hotel. The NBA All-Stars also organized a strike for the tip-off in 1964, fighting for better working conditions for all players – a major event in the history of the sports labor movement. But we have never seen so many players refuse to take the court in solidarity with a social movement that runs far beyond sports.
The closest analogy could be if Roberto Clemente and the Pittsburgh Pirates voted not to open on opening day in 1968 – the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. – and other clubs eventually followed. The Dodgers, who had broken the league’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947, were the last holdouts, and the team’s front office thought King’s funeral would be over by the time his game began. But the club had no choice but to end up hollowing out when the team they were placed to host, the Philadelphia Phillies, said they would rather lose than take the field. It was another case of the Black players of a league who had to bundle them up and threaten a boycott to protest injustice.
But back to 2020. The Milwaukee Bucks, of all teams in all leagues, may seem like a strange place find the funk for such a historic strike, but they are not – in particular for a protest against racial justice. According to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES), 83.1 percent of NBA players in the 2019-20 season are people of color, including 74.2 percent who are black or African-American. Simply put, no other league has such a large share of players who can identify so strongly with the horror of police violence against Black Americans.
“It could be me,” Portland Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard (among others) said in a video released after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in May.
And the Bucks were as vocal as any NBA team on the subject of police brutality – Milwaukee police apologize to Bucks guard Sterling Brown in 2018 after officials took the player to the ground and charged him over a parking dispute. Plus, Kenosha is located just 39 miles south of Milwaukee, and places the incident in the backyard of the club. The Bucks’ players used their time in court Wednesday to work for change, keeping a conference call from her locker room with the Attorney General of Wisconsin and Lieutenant-Governor, asking what could be done about the problem of police reform in the state.
The strike, four years after Colin Kaepernick first knelt down at the national anthem to call for racial justice, comes as support for white Americans for Black Lives Matter protests has waned. The election numbers on the question, which rose after Floyd’s death, have fallen in recent months – closer to where they were before the Floyd protests.
But do not expect widespread spread of the strike among NBA fans. The players’ commitment to race law is helped by the very liberal fan base of their sport. According to a poll we conducted in early May in collaboration with the market research firm Ipsos, basketball is one of the sports with the highest proportion of “big” or “casual” fans who identify themselves as Democrats. We found that only football fans (with nearly 64 percent identifying as Democrats) leaned more to the left than basketball fans (of whom nearly 60 percent were Democrats).
Basketball has a left fan side
Two-party share of self-described big or casual fans who identified themselves as Democrats or Republicans in a FiveThirtyEight / Ipsos poll
| Share of support from two parties of fans | ||
|---|---|---|
| Sport | The Democrats | Republicans |
| Football | 63.9% | 36.1% |
| Basketball | 59.7 | 40.3 |
| Football | 49.5 | 50.5 |
| Baseball | 44.2 | 55.8 |
| Hockey | 38.4 | 61.6 |
| Golf | 37.4 | 62.6 |
| NASCAR | 32.6 | 67.4 |
Our previous research also showed that the NBA has the most left-wing fandom of any major men’s pro league. So NBA fans are likely to remain sympathetic to the players’ cause, in general – which may have served to isolate the league from the kind of political backlash the NFL faced after players suffered a knee injury. took during the national anthem to protest against police violence, for example.
In recent decades, the NBA has become increasingly at the forefront of social awareness among sports leagues. According to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, the Los Angeles Clippers are seriously considering boycotting Game 5 of their playoff series in the first round in 2014, after recordings emerged of team owner Donald Sterling making racist remarks. But they finally decided to play – in the words of Blake Griffin, “we did not play for [Sterling] in the first place. “
That near-boycott played a role in Adam Silver’s decision to ban Sterling from the league, an important moment not only in Silver’s stewardship as commissioner, but also in the league’s evolution as a force for progressive social change. After the unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida a few years ago, members of the Miami Heat wore hoodies in solidarity. Many stars also wore shirts “I Can’t Breathe” after New York police killed Eric Garner in 2014.
More recently, NBA players were involved in the protests following Floyd’s death over the summer. The ability to continue those protests was on top when players discussed the bell, a closed environment, for several months of playoff games to go into. Brooklyn Nets’ Kyrie Irving led a June call with fellow players, asking if a return to play would distract from the message of the Black Lives Matter protests going off the bell.
The refusal to play on Wednesday could be seen as an extension of the same philosophical debate: Is it done better by playing – seen by some as a distraction from the social problems at hand – but being visible on TV every night, or protest and stay focused on the bigger message but have less of a traditional media platform? The NBA will have to deal with this question again on Thursday.
