Hockey’s Greatest Team Ever Had Only One Path to Humiliation-and They Found It The Weirdest NBA Megastar Career Keeps Getting Weirder I mean, studies always show that Black athletes, Black men, are always active in the communities in terms of giving back money, time, all this other sort of things. I think that they’ve always been active within their communities. But he’s actually just decided to stick his face into the buzzsaw, which says something about him and says something about the people around him, who he’s had to surround himself with.Īnd one other quick thing: I would say that, to circle back to what we said about getting a chance to view the players, I think the players have always been like this. It would be enough if he was just playing basketball and was just like, “I try to stay out of politics” or whatever.
You know what I mean? It’s not like he had Grant Hill’s background, where he grew up under Wellesley and Yale graduates and had all this other stuff. I mean, there’s no reason for him to be as good at any of this stuff as he is. But LeBron, in terms of growing into his voice, has just been amazing. You can see that there probably is a little bit of a generational divide, though, because some of the younger players did not want to play, like the Kyrie Irving or Jaylen Brown, who were a little bit more skeptical of the NBA owners and their intentions and following up on the things that they said they would do. I mean, he’s clearly been positioning himself to take on that role for years.
… Who cares? But he was able to sort of carry the burden of being the spokesman for the players on this monumental social justice effort.Īnderson: Yeah. LeBron not only did something on the court to cement his legacy as the greatest or second-greatest player. The NBA had billions of dollars at its disposal to enact an operation like the bubble, but it seems like they used them judiciously in the service of the players and in the service of the fans, too.įatsis: We saw that with the strike, but we also saw that with the continued articulation of genuine goals and policy ideals from so many players led by LeBron James. He said that it’s difficult to articulate that without sounding like you’re a victim of Stockholm syndrome, but it’s true. He points out that there was a personal kindness, in his words, to the way the NBA leadership responded to players and journalists and staff who made the bubble work. And I think it’s not fashionable to praise sports commissioners, but in the case of the NBA, Adam Silver has demonstrated over the last few years since he took over from David Stern that he is thoughtful, that he is likable, and that he is agreeable to conversation, to negotiation, to listening to his constituents, to listening to the employees in this league who are the players.īen Golliver in the Washington Post did the best summation of the bubble life and the end of the bubble. That’s not necessarily anything that’s going on in a lot of other institutions across our country.įatsis: Right. The workforce trusts the leadership, and the leadership trusts the workforce. But I also think it’s worth noting that the NBA has had certain structural advantages and certain cultural advantages that other leagues and other parts of our society don’t have.Īnderson: Some of that is that they trust their leadership.
I thought that that was really impressive. No one was saying, “Do we really need to be doing this?” Or if they were saying it, they were saying it quietly enough that it never made it out into the press.
But aside from these couple of prominent examples, really everyone bought in. Maybe someone went to a gentleman’s club when he shouldn’t have. There was maybe a little bit of somebody crossed the line, picking up some takeout or whatever. It really is an argument for culture, the fact that all the players bought in from the start. It didn’t have to do an entire season and also has very smart coherent leadership and buy-in from the players. The NBA is smaller than let’s say the NFL. Thomas: On giving credit to the NBA as a model for the rest of us: While I totally share that view, it’s a little bit like saying we should be more like Denmark.
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