Summer in bubble worked on many fronts
As the NBA bubble nears its conclusion, it can be viewed as a victory for the league and for professional sports.
Healthwise, it was wildly successful. No player tested positive. The league took extreme precautions with players, executives, employees, and media members to ensure safety, and it worked.
The only glitch came when the players decided to postpone playing because of their anger following the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha, Wis., police. The players took three days off, meeting with team owners, with the league improving its social justice stance besides “Black Lives Matter” on the floor and slogans on the backs of jerseys.
We will never know how seriously the players contemplated leaving the bubble, but talks were serious and contentious. One party who was not there in person was commissioner Adam Silver, who is now in the bubble and made an appearance in the early bubble games in the second tier — where he couldn’t have contact with players.
Silver, of course, was kept abreast of the players’ issues but had not spoken on the topic until this past week.
“No. 1, I prefer not to refer to it as a boycott,” he said. “To me, a boycott is when your employees or a group of people are seeking through economic leverage to change the conduct of somebody. I felt in this case, in our partnership with the players, I understood how — after the fact understood more about how it unfolded with the Milwaukee Bucks. But I never viewed this as necessarily aimed at the league. I think there was a larger message that the play
ers wanted to make here. I prefer to view it as a work stoppage.”
The Bucks were the first team to call for a “work stoppage,” refusing to play in their playoff contest against the Magic. The four other teams obliged and the NBA stopped playing for three days while there were hours of talks with players, players’ union officials, and team governors.
“I found out about it as it was happening in real time,” Silver said. “There, of course, had been rumors; many of you in this room had written early in the day that there was some contemplation. I was on the phone early in the day with Chris Paul, who was here at the time. I was on the phone with [NBPA executive director] Michele [Roberts], who was then and still is here, and I think it was the sense earlier in the day that the games were going to play on that night. As we all now know, there was a spontaneous aspect to it. Certainly people had thought about it.”
George Hill was the first Bucks players to decide he wasn’t playing in the Aug. 26 game, and his teammates decided to sit out with him. There were players during
those intense meetings that were angry that Silver was not in the bubble during these pivotal times. Silver, whose wife delivered a child early in the year, was monitoring the situation.
“I was at home, but colleagues who were here were in the arena, and again, as we all now know, certainly the Orlando Magic did not know this was happening because they were on the floor warming up,” he said. “But then I was called and told the Milwaukee Bucks are not coming out of their locker room, and then I think for the next two days or so it was pretty much round-the-clock talking to groups of players, groups of team executives who were here, groups of governors who weren’t here. We just were seeking to work through the issues.”
The league and NBPA worked on those social justice slogans, but the players didn’t believe it was enough. Also, many arena employees who were donning “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts while working games slowly began wearing NBA logoed T-shirts. That changed back to the BLM gear immediately.
“In terms of the social justice messages, ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the court, the words that are on the jerseys, that was something that was initiated by the Players Association,” Silver said. “Again, as I said earlier, there were really three factors in terms of how it was that we would restart, and social justice was one of them. I’d say to me, certainly it began with what’s important to our players is important to us, but it wasn’t just our players. The players know and the NBA community knows there’s a long history in this league of fighting for social justice, for racial equality. And it seemed appropriate.
“These were decisions that were made quickly in terms of standing up this restart. I think there was some misunderstanding around some of the messages sort of that there was a sense of censorship, that why aren’t these other messages. But these were messages that were proposed by the players through the Players Association and agreed to after some discussion with the league.”
Silver said there will continue to be talks between players and the league on social justice issues. The campaign won’t stop when the bubble ends.
“And I’ve said since then that I viewed this as extraordinary circumstances. I understand, put aside the substance of the message, there are a lot of fans, especially given all that’s going on in the world right now, who look to sports as a respite,” he said. “My response is that, again, I’m listening. And I understand that point of view, too. But these are unique times, and I think that given the circumstances, I still firmly believe it was and is the right thing to do.”