But on Sunday, after police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake multiple times in the back and a video of the incident taken by a witness went viral, the relative peace of the bubble was reversed. In the protests that followed in Kenosha, a gunman killed two people and injured a third. On Monday night, Lakers’ LeBron James, the league’s highest-profile star, retweeted the news of Blake’s shooting and wrote, in part, “This shit is so wrong and so sad !! I feel so sorry for him, his family and OUR PEOPLE !! We want JUSTICE. “Wednesday, soon before James wrote on Twitter, “FUCK THIS MAN !!!! WE ASK FOR A CHANGE. SICK OF IT”, the Milwaukee Bucks, the favorite team to win the NBA title, did not speak for Game 5 of their playoff series against the Orlando Magic. Instead, they stayed in the locker room while the Magic warmed up. When it came time for the game, the Bucks, spurred on by the violence in a town a short distance from their home arena, refused to play.
Read: Jacob Blake’s shooting is a wake-up call
Even though the frustration was mounting …James and the Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers has made heartbreaking, tearful post-match statements demonstrating their frustration and fear of what it means to be black in America, and some players have openly speculated about what a strike would mean – a strike is still something of a shock. Less than an hour after the Bucks decided not to play, two more playoff games scheduled for yesterday – Game 5 between the Lakers and Blazers and Game 5 between the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder – have been postponed.
Despite the language in the collective agreement between the players association and the league that specifically prohibits strikes, NBA players had gone on strike. The Bucks Players held a conference call with Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and Deputy Governor Mandela Barnes yesterday afternoon following their decision to forfeit the game, and the the team released a statement shortly after calling for the Wisconsin state legislature to meet again to address police reform. The league players also held a meeting last night to discuss their next steps, and the first news is that the Lakers and Clippers voted for a boycott the rest of the NBA season.
Read: The insidious logic of ‘sticking to sport’
Nobody seems to know where the strike will ultimately lead or how long it will last. But already, by refusing to participate in last night’s games, these NBA players, in the midst of the strangest climax of a season in league history, embarked on perhaps the most monumental work stoppage in the history of any great American sport.
For years, it traced back to James and his Miami Heat teammates wearing hoodies in 2012 to protest the Trayvon Martin shooting, and long before, when Boston Celtics center Bill Russell talked about his hometown’s racism over the years. 1960s and when Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was suspended for refusing to run for the national anthem in 1996, the NBA was arguably the most politically and socially progressive of all major sports leagues. Partly because it caters to a young and diverse audience and most NBA players are men of color. By contrast, Major League Baseball has long attracted a whiter, more suburban audience. The NFL, America’s most popular sports league, is a huge, faceless conglomerate; it seems that Commissioner Roger Goodell and the owners of the teams worked hard to ensure that he represented nothing beyond football itself.
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