A first night to remember
When his postgame Zoom interview was over, before making a triumphant exit to the team bus, Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz acknowledged that the historic play he was savoring did not go exactly as planned.
“I wasn’t supposed to get a post-up,” Gobert said. “I was supposed to get a dunk.”
After using a Donovan Mitchell screen to shake free, finally corralling a deflected pass and then spinning back toward the baseline against an ex-teammate, Derrick Favors, Gobert dropped the ball in right over Favors inside the first 20 seconds Thursday night. Gobert’s brief nod that followed seemed to acknowledge the significance of the score.
What Gobert ultimately got was a layup that will be recorded as the first NBA basket in July that has ever counted. He scored the first two points and the last two points in Utah’s 106-104 victory over the New Orleans Pelicans, the first game of the NBA restart at Walt Disney World — 141 days after Gobert’s positive coronavirus test on March 11 led to the indefinite suspension of the season.
“Life works in a mysterious way,” Gobert said.
That opening sequence and his clinching free throws, as a mere 62.1 per cent foul shooter, helped make it a redemptive evening for Gobert — shortly after a moving social justice protest, in an arena with no fans but teeming with unity and purpose, made it a momentous occasion for the whole league.
For more than four minutes before the Jazz and the Pelicans tipped off, both teams’ players, coaches and staff members, along with the referees, congregated side by side, stretching from baseline to baseline. They gathered near the BLACK LIVES MATTER lettering affixed to the floor near the scorer’s table at each of the three game venues at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, then knelt in unison during the playing of the national anthem recorded by Jon Baptiste.
The Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers came together to do the same thing before their game, during a recorded rendition of the anthem by the Compton Kidz Club from the Los Angeles area. LeBron James had just helped the Lakers clinch a 103-101 victory with winning plays at both ends in the final 12.8 seconds when he told TNT in a postgame interview: “I hope our fans are proud of us.”
James wasn’t talking about the basketball. Nor was he referring to the league’s official comeback, after such a lengthy coronavirus-imposed absence, or the hopeful start to NBA’s efforts to erect a so-called bubble on the Disney campus (at a cost of at least $180 million U.S.) with made-for-television arena settings and daily coronavirus testing. Like most players involved in Thursday’s doubleheader, James was moved most by the unity displayed in their anthem protest.
“I hope we made Kap proud,” James said, referring to the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who began kneeling during the anthem in the 2016 NFL season to protest racial injustice.
Said the Pelicans’ JJ Redick: “The ‘stick to sports’ crowd, keep politics out of sports, all those things, they’re meaningless now. You can’t. Politics and sports coexist now, and the league has recognized that.”