2019-2020 NBA Season Thread Basketball • Page 1070

man, apparently.

 

Given what we knew last night, that the LA teams were in the minority of wanting to stay out, the outcome doesn’t surprise me. I hope they use their leverage they know they have going forward.

 

what a great point

 

cancel the season

 

LeBron: I vote to sit out the playoffs.
Smooth brains: He's going to go back on his word
LeBron gets outvoted and sides with democratic majority.
Smooth brains: See, I told you he's a pussy.

 

*another black man gets executed point blank by a cop on video 3 weeks from now*

"how come our action plans aren't working"

 

the way i see it if all this accomplished is more communication between players and those in political positions of power and hopefully larger contributions from owners to blm causes then it was quite worth it for a couple of days without basketball.

that’s without counting the attention they brought to the cause and the show of power they got across, which may not be a tangible change but its definitely not nothing

 

Just let LeBron debate Trump on TV.

I stand by my notion that LeBron could run for president and win. He's as influential as Kanye thinks Kanye is.

 

what do you want the basketball players to do? the systemic racism of police will not be undone in days, weeks, months or even years. It is wildly complex and you know that.

 

I think getting things second/third hand is probably also not a great way to know what happened. But my guess is there was never any kind of formal "vote" it was more of a talk about things, the LA teams apparently were far more ready to formalize a boycott, when that didn't seem to be the majority, they agreed to go along with the rest. I think it being out of the blue like what the Bucks did threw everyone off, and didn't know if they should join, or not, or what that would say, or what everyone wanted to do next, all of that is the really really hard part of collective action, or using collective power, and I don't blame them for struggling through it. I think they, and all sports teams, should join together and say they won't play until XYZ happens. And I have some suggestions for those XYZ's as well. The problem is, this isn't a checklist solved scenario. It's a years long push, not a "we fixed it!" situation.

 

I, for one, am very disappointed that the NBA didn't solve institutional racism last night.

If I were the players, I would have simply done that and then, and only then, would I have played Madden.

 

@Sean Murphy

 

One of the problems of a celebrity driven culture is we lean into the idea that celebrities should solve everything for us. We just sit back, passively, and watch them do it. That's not how it should be. We, the consumer, we, the labor in our industries, also need to be actively trying to build these coalitions and unions and working with them, not hoping they'll do it for us on TV while we have a snack and tweet about it.

 

I think the only misstep so far is announcing that the playoffs will continue. Even if they decide they want to play, not playing is their biggest source of leverage and keeping that option on the table can get the most out of the owners.

I’m saying even if they agreed last night that they will play games, don’t tell anyone that!

 

To be fair, they haven't announced anything. Its been a few players leaking to the press. We will see how the formal announcement phrases things.

 

yeah this is exactly it.

 

do you think players aren't the ones leaking info to woj? wild if so

 

Woj might as well have been physically in the room last night. He’ll probably have an ESPN article up sometime today covering the entire thing beginning to end.

 

Leverage Is Everything - In These Times

 

Seems possible that they did agree to that last night, and leaked that the clippers and lakers were against it to legitimize a threat? I mean, that option is still on the table. The players can go whenever they want.

 

The league isn’t boycotting anything; the NBA needs collective bereavement

Which gets to the question that keeps coming up: What does this solve? What do you want? Maybe they don’t know. They shouldn’t have to. A collective bereavement pause on the league might be what everyone needs anyway. Lord knows how tough 2020 has been on everyone. But the point is that should be good enough.

If you’re going to plaster Black Lives Matter all over the court, it shouldn’t mean that every matter relating to black existence should be a matter of proverbial or real life-or-death. Alas, when framed as such, it undercuts our own ability to write the path to our safety overall. But, because the pangs of power set off internalized alarms of soft supremacy whenever Black folks speak up, we are forced to answer questions that push everything into a binary. It’s entirely possible that they don’t know how to go about this right now, but something has to change. It’s not like what anyone was doing has been working, so why not let the aggrieved parties take the time to figure out a solution? Otherwise, it’s disingenuous. And we know the difference.

This was very good.