NBA players have finally arrived en masse to the league’s theme park campus in the past week, and the content machine has quickly started to perform at its best. So far we have experienced jokes about who is using the “spy” hotline, players who accidentally interrupt their quarantine, reporters sharing their hotel room exercise routines, exhaustively detailed room service accounts, who has gained and who lost weight, and the “mysterious” absences of some players who are kept away from the rest of their teammates for “undisclosed” reasons. And then we have the Nuggets forward Jerami Grant.
Speaking to the media on Wednesday, Grant answered almost all of his questions regarding the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT who was shot dead by police officers who entered his home without knocking on March 13th. . The cops involved in the shootings were not charged with any crime. On Tuesday, 87 people (including the NFLer Kenny Stills) were arrested in Kentucky for protesting the shootings at the home of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
When initially asked how he and his teammates were spending time in Orlando, Grant immediately turned his attention to Taylor.
“I think it’s nice to be here with my teammates,” said Grant. “It’s nice to go back to playing basketball. Personally, and I think of many players, I think it is essential to focus on what is really important in the world. One thing, for me, is that Breonna Taylor’s killers continue to roam free. I think I just want to focus on this with these interviews. “
Grant answered all subsequent questions during his availability with regards to Taylor and civil unrest, and when the Nuggets released the video of his responses, they did so with the caption “Arrest the cops who killed Breanna Taylor.”
Despite the flood of secondary stories coming with the return of the NBA, the Florida campus plan in the league remains a precarious endeavor. Florida is still an outbreak of coronaviruses, with the number of new cases and deaths that have passed alarmingly. NBA players, coaches and media are subjected to rapid daily tests while many state residents – such as theme park workers who clean rooms or serve food – wait much longer to get results on a potentially fatal virus, if they are subjected to everyone. And then there is the question of social justice for all of this.
The movement against systemic racism and police brutality has not stopped. And the need for action within the institutions has not dissipated. The NBA is trying to offer players a platform to raise awareness of these issues, but its first initiative – which allows league-approved slogans on the back of the uniforms – was met with a collective “meh”. (A company-controlled “protest” is how you end up with a completely hot and meaningless statement like “Equality” as one of the options to put on a shirt. Andre Iguodala probably summed up how many players feel by choosing to put “Group Economics” on the back of his uniform.)
For those who fear how the return of the league may divert the spotlight from systemic racism, we are seeing that it is playing a bit for the amount of space occupied by all the silly antics taking place within the confines of the campus. This does not mean that people cannot have their attention on separate things, that everyone inside must be 100% focused on everything that is wrong in the world during every waking moment, or that there is no benefit for the escape that the league is providing by coming back. But one of the strengths of the NBA’s largely financially motivated return was that it would find a way to help those who were fighting for their civil rights, and this is one of the most important metrics on which the whole operation should be evaluated.
Grant deserves to be commended for focusing on Taylor. As the NBA experiment continues, particularly once the scripts and games have started, more and more attention from those closest to the courts will be drawn to this country’s most pressing issues. Grant is making sure his attention – and ours – gets stuck on what deserves to be in the foreground.
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