Painting Black Lives Matter in massive letters and letting all the millionaires virtue signal on their jerseys while they subtly lecture all of us about being good people from their ivory towers isn't enough I suppose. Lebron James making a speech riddled with verbal spelling and grammar mistakes about how everyone should be living their lives wasn't enough either I guess. The fact that game viewership is down by nearly half from last year due to the games being less exciting and many people tuning out because of politics getting injected into the sport wasn't enough either apparently.
Now we have an entire team that refused to play in order to make a statement to the United States: Well, the message has been received and I don't think it is going to pan out the way that the Bucks would like it to.
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The Bucks were reportedly in the locker room trying to get through to the attorney general in Wisconsin who had not responded to their calls when they decided to call off the game. I find this part of it amusing and it reminds me of Dave Chappelle's reference to MTV bringing Ja Rule on to comment about 9/11 shortly after the original events with the buildings in NYC fell. "Aint nobody give F**K what Ja Rule thinks about this?"
The attorney general likely didn't answer the phone because he knew a bunch of millionaires who are really good at basketball are the latest wave of celebrities that are trying to be social justice warriors on a grand scale. What were they going to talk about if he did answer the phone? Make demands? Threaten to hold the playoffs hostage unless he performed some sort of attorney general magic?
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I have remained quiet about this up until now because I was trying to ignore it but I will now admit that I am dead tired of the NBA and all other sports getting involved in politics and social justice on a grand scale. I ignored it because I love sports and in particular the NBA right now because it is one of the only sports other than UFC that is carrying on in the United States that I actually care about.
If the Bucks' reasoning behind this was to somehow curry favor with the public in regards to a very complicated (and convoluted by the media) social situation, then they are having the opposite effect on me. I now resent them for this because everyone is struggling right now and we kind of looked to you guys, who get paid a ton of money to play a sport, are going to take away the little bit of enjoyment that sports fans get in their lives. Lives which have been torn apart by a pandemic and overzealous politicians seeking to curry favor with the population using racism as a pedestal.
State governments are not going to capitulate to NBA players or any sports figures: I think you would be hard-pressed to find a high-ranking government official that cares enough about the games not happening to even pay any attention to them. They aren't going to affect those people but they do affect people like me: Middle class people that want to escape the societal divide right now just for 48 minutes while we watch some very talented people throw a ball around and in that hour get paid far more than I make in a year.
Will they go back? Well, the NBA has remained tight-lipped about this but you can bet that there is probably something in their contracts that says that they have to or face contractual consequences. I can guarantee one thing: They certainly aren't going to win new fans by doing this but there is a really good chance they could lose some old ones.
Never cared about the NBA. They in a way forfeited the game so orlando won.
They are already going back. This was humorous to all of us out there that think celebrities try to come down to our level and tell us how to live. If you listen to an interview with most professional athletes around the world they seem to have the mental capacities of teenagers and certainly aren't the kind of people I want to have guiding my life in anything other than the sport they excel at. There are exceptions but one thing comes to mind is interviews of any sort with Karl Malone... They were hilarious and it was apparent that aside from basketball that guy probably knows less about most things than 6th graders.
I can't watch these games because of the time difference between Florida and Vietnam, but this sort of attitude on the part of the players is irritating. They must want some of that Kaepernick money! Being a professional tweeter and activist requires a lot less physical activity than playing basketball.
They should have been forced to forfeit that game... then we could see if they care enough about the cause... funny how the mood would have changed once the players were potentially looking at a consequence that might have affected their own wallets.