Filter removed for professional athletes

He remembers being afraid to look police officers in the eye “because you didn’t want to be questioned.” He said he had friends who were at his home one day, and killed by police later that week.

“Even now, I drive a nice car and I’m still being questioned: ‘How you get this car?’”

DeRozan said it reminds him of being a kid, “like we were hiding (from the police) or running from something, even if you didn’t do anything.”

Dwane Casey, the Raptors coach, began his education at a segregated school in small-town Kentucky. It was integrated when he was going into Grade 4 and he remembers getting into fights with the white kids. He said what the president has been saying is hurtful.

“It hurts because most players, the majority of players, are minorities and it’s almost like, ‘You have a right to entertain us, but you don’t have a right to be able to speak up about something,’” Casey said. “And that hurts me because I’ve come through that, I’ve come through segregation.”

There is a stay-in-yourlane element to much of the criticism of athletes, even if they are just silently kneeling. This argument says athletes can say whatever they want on their own time, but not when they are representing their team.

But being a pro athlete isn’t like being a barista, a banker or a steelworker. They are always representing their team, and if they say or do something dumb in private, it could cost them their job. Is an athlete supposed to sever his thoughts from his professional profile? Hold office hours after practice?

There is also this: “We are human beings first,” Kyle Lowry said Monday.

Should he be banned from speaking his mind as an individual because he happens to be an athlete?

“I want to use my platform in a positive way,” he said. (He did one-up his backcourt mate in suggesting Trump sometimes acts like a sixyear-old on social media.)

Hockey players were speaking out on Monday, too, with Blake Wheeler saying in Winnipeg that he had enough of Trump’s rhetoric and teammate Matt Hendricks saying while he wouldn’t kneel during the anthem, he would respect those who did. “It’s not just the flag,” he said. “For the others that choose to take a knee, it’s a different reason.”

There was a lot of that, too, including Toronto’s Auston Matthews, who said he felt kneeling was disrespectful to the military but he understood free speech was protected by “one of those amendments.”

Not everyone agrees with that position. But the right to disagree is kind of the point. Donald Trump has always spoken his mind, and was elected president because of it. He has now sparked the sports world to do the same. The filters are off. It will take some getting used to.