The NBA no longer wants to protest. The season of players in the streets with the demonstrators is over, no games suspended, no messages launched worldwide by the basketball players. American sport doesn’t stop even in the face of civil war scenes in Minneapolis. The death on the street of nurse Alex Pretti, killed in cold blood by the brutal anti-immigration police sent by the Trump administration, caused minimal disruptions in the most important basketball league on the planet. The game between the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Golden State Warriors last Saturday – the day of the murder – was only postponed by twenty-four hours: between federal agents and demonstrators on the street there were no security conditions to host a large event. Instead, Anthony Edwards, Stephen Curry and all the others went on the court on Sunday afternoon. A minute of silence before the tap-off. That’s all.
The NBA felt it could not resist. The show must go on. It had already happened a couple of weeks ago, again in Minneapolis, when another federal agent killed Renee Nicole Good, thirty-seven, a mother of three, while she was driving her car in the south of the city. The next evening, fifteen minutes away from the execution site, the Minnesota Timberwolves had played their regular season. Even in that case, a minute of silence was all the recognition the NBA could grant. The professional sports machine had done what it does best: create entertainment, highlights, emotions. «What kind of country does something like that? If the goal is to force those in power to pay attention, vigils or press releases are not enough.” Lee Escobedo had written in the Guardian after Good’s murder. The most effective response would have been and still will be only one: the Timberwolves should refuse to play.
These are difficult choices, but it means deciding which side to take. The NBA is the only professional sports league in the United States that could make such radical choices. On the one hand there is the logic of numbers, millions of viewers, television contracts, sponsors, merchandising. Every match is a perfect watch that generates wealth and visibility, regardless of what happens off the court. On the other hand there is a long memory that no political decision can erase. Bill Russell never stopped saying that his work on the pitch was also political, and indeed he worked every day to instill a social conscience among the basketball players of his era, a community that was still entirely white in the 1960s. Kareem Abdul‑Jabbar refused to participate in the Olympics in 1968 as a sign of protest. In 2020, after Jacob Blake was injured in Kenosha (Wisconsin), the Milwaukee Bucks (Wisconsin’s franchise) did not take the field. They stopped the league. Back then we played in Orlando, in a bubble that was impervious from the outside. The pandemic had forced the NBA to bring all the teams to one place to contain infections – they opted for the enormous Disneyworld complex. But the Jacob Blake episode could not go unpunished. The Florida parquet had become a political square and silence had seemed an impossible choice. For some it was all purely performative, a virtue signaling an end in itself. But it was a strong gesture for a global show, also considering the ban on strikes and the penalties imposed by those who have the rights to broadcast the matches.
That same year, a few months earlier, not far from where Renee Good was killed, a local police officer killed George Floyd. It was that episode that gave rise to one of the largest demonstrations in recent US history. Many athletes participated, becoming a megaphone for the protests. George Floyd Square is there to remember that moment.
Today that season of protests seems to have definitively faded. Only six years have passed, but everything has changed. The language of activism has become familiar, almost decorative, and sport has begun to call itself neutral again. Business, entertainment, calendar. The rest outside the arena. Postponing a match is too inconvenient. But in a country that has learned to live with violence as background noise – it’s the low-intensity civil war we talked about in September – even a symbolic gesture from the NBA can become a strong signal. Especially in an election year, with the November midterm vote that could scare Donald Trump.
Creating a united front in opposition to the administration’s authoritarian attitude would have considerable political value. And sport can once again be an aggregator of voices and ideas. Not remaining silent is a first step.
In the last few hours some NBA players and coaches have started to launch small impulses. The first was Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers, who on X defined Alex Pretti’s murder as “a murder”. His voice remained isolated for several hours. Then some other players joined in, on social media or speaking at a press conference. And timidly also the Minneapolis teams, therefore Twolves, Lynx, Vikings, United FC and Wild, who signed a joint statement published by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Finally, a statement arrived from the NBA players’ union, the NBPA. In closing he quotes the words of Martin Luther King, the most relevant in an otherwise too institutional text: “The moment comes when silence is a betrayal.”
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