KateFabersBoyfriend
Superstar
A Higher Court
The messy politics of the NBA.
By Jeremy Gordon
SEPTEMBER 20, 2022
Illustration by Andrew Kuo for The Joy of Basketball (Abrams), 2021.
In October 2019, a scant few months before the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, the Brooklyn Nets and the Los Angeles Lakers were scheduled to play a low-stakes exhibition game in Shanghai before the start of the upcoming season. The game was part of the league’s ongoing courtship of international markets, but it was suddenly overshadowed by a tweet from then–Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey that seemed to express support for the protests in Hong Kong. (The since-deleted tweet was an image that read: “Fight for Freedom Stand With Hong Kong.”) The protests had been ongoing since March, but the backlash was immediate: The Chinese Basketball Association suspended its relationship with the Rockets, while Chinese state television and the streaming giant Tencent announced that they would stop broadcasting NBA games. The Nets’ scheduled visit to a Chinese school was canceled, but the exhibition game eventually took place despite the tense atmosphere.
The dustup over the Morey episode put the NBA and its players in an uncomfortable position. While the NBA has mostly stayed out of international affairs, the league and its players have long been involved in domestic politics, especially during the tenure of the current league commissioner, Adam Silver. Throughout Trump’s presidency, highly visible coaches like Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich bashed his administration almost every week. After North Carolina passed a bill forcing transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to their gender assigned at birth, the league took the annual All-Star Game away from the city of Charlotte. But when it came to China, the NBA faced a quandary: The country was the NBA’s biggest overseas market and a focal point of its expansion efforts over the past few decades. An ESPN report, published in May 2022, found that NBA owners have a collective $10 billion invested in China, on top of the league’s existing business commitments. So Morey deleted his tweet, and a party line quickly developed among the Nets and Lakers players present in Shanghai: Say nothing. At a meeting of NBA officials and players, Lakers star LeBron James—arguably the most famous basketball player in the world—captured the league’s approach to the issue: “We don’t need to be talking.”
The 2019-20 season that followed only heightened the tension between the NBA’s professed image as one of the most progressive leagues in organized sports and its pursuit of profit. A few months after Covid arrived in the United States, the league decided to quarantine its players in a “bubble” at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., to finish out the season, which had been postponed along with a host of other events in American society. The bubble was a strange experiment for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because the players were not quite sure whether they should even be playing basketball in the first place. The protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder and the shooting of Jacob Blake pushed this question even further to the fore: Many players began to talk explicitly about striking and canceling the season for good. Again the league faced a difficult dilemma: If the players staged a walkout, would it sanction that action as part of its pledge to pursue racial justice? Or would it snap back to business mode and force everyone to shut up and dribble?
Two new books tell the story of the 2019-20 season and its discontents. Matt Sullivan’s Can’t Knock the Hustle is about the Nets season that year, but it frequently expounds on the shifting political and economic priorities of the NBA over the past decade and how the players’ ambitions have collided with the realities of the machine. Bubbleball by Ben Golliver is a chronological account of the bubble experience, written by a reporter with a firsthand perspective on how its simmering tensions threatened to dynamite the uneasy situation. Despite these differences in scope, both books come back to the underlying contradiction facing the modern NBA: Beyond its grandstanding public gestures and its players’ and coaches’ tweet-size missives, the NBA is composed mostly of millionaires and billionaires seeking to expand their own bottom lines. The super-sized well-to-do likely won’t fix things from within, these books warn. While the unreasonably optimistic might hold out hope that the NBA will one day evolve into a supercharged vehicle for social progress, it is unlikely that either the league’s executives or its players can meaningfully effect change through a flawed system that benefits them nonetheless.
The National Basketball Association wasn’t the first professional sports league to employ Black players, but it was the first whose Black players were consistently and obviously the best. Thanks to the singular dominance of players like Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who gave vocal support to civil rights and racial equality in the 1950s and ’60s, the NBA took on a progressive bent early on. Yet the league’s politics were hardly consistent, and the commitment of players like Russell, Baylor, and Abdul-Jabbar was not always shared by their successors. Michael Jordan—the greatest basketball player to follow them—once pointed out that “Republicans buy sneakers too” when he declined to endorse a Black politician running against the notorious racist Jesse Helms, which is just one of many examples of star players shirking their civic duty. But the NBA’s players still cumulatively leaned toward liberation, and its current batch of millennial and Gen-Z players are especially comfortable expressing their political views. In 2014, when recordings of then–Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist remarks were leaked to the press, he was loudly criticized by the players he employed; Sterling was eventually forced to sell the team and was permanently banned from the league. And the league itself has seemingly welcomed this shift, as Sullivan acknowledges when he semi-jokingly calls it “The Woke NBA.”
But the league is a business above all else; its most important priority is generating revenue, and the players’ most important priority is getting some of that revenue. During the China controversy, then executive director of the NBA players’ union, Michele Roberts, was unequivocal about this: “If there was any conspiracy of silence,” she said, “it was motivated by guys not wanting to lose any more money.” Or as Roberts later added when discussing how the players could raise awareness about the killing of Breonna Taylor: “Anyone who suggests that the players should be intending to create revolutionaries out of their fans—that’s an incredibly naive assumption.”
The Brooklyn Nets’ Kyrie Irving, one of Sullivan’s main subjects in Can’t Knock the Hustle, is the most prominent exception to this rule. While many of his peers kept their silence about China, and opportunistic right-wingers hammered them for their presumed hypocrisy, the Nets’ star point guard instead poked holes in the debate, arguing that it was unfair to ask this group of ball players to micromanage geopolitics. ESPN reported that before the exhibition game, Irving “had asked aloud whether the Nets and Los Angeles Lakers should consider not playing because of the political tension.” And when demonstrators supporting the Hong Kong protesters gathered inside and outside Barclays Center, where the team plays, Irving told the press: “Colored people here in America…. We’re fighting for everyday freedoms. So when I think about Hong Kong and China, the people are in an uproar, and for us as Americans to comment on it, African Americans or American Indians to comment on that, you’re connected nonetheless, especially when it impacts freedoms or world peace. So for me as an individual, I stand up for those four pillars, and when they’re being conflicted, I can understand why protestors come to the games.”
Irving’s willingness to speak out in a moment when everyone in the league was being instructed to just shut up was all the more striking given his superstar status. “Kyrie was a rebel by nature,” Sullivan writes. “And he made every effort, as did so many athletes in America’s new pastime, to be more than famous.” Sullivan quotes league veteran Andre Iguodala saying much of the same when he compares Irving to the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was effectively blacklisted for kneeling during the National Anthem; another player says Irving “does whatever is in his soul…. It’s not as meticulously planned, but it’s who he is—it’s outrageously authentic, and it’s supremely Kyrie.”
Since entering the NBA in 2011, Kyrie has established this reputation for zigging wherever his peers zagged. Whether it was semi-seriously coming out as a flat-Earther, posting quotes from Fred Hampton on his Instagram, or skipping games to attend a Zoom organizing call with Cynthia Nixon, Irving liked to toy with the expectations placed on him for being exceptionally good at handling a basketball. And when he came to the Nets in 2019, the team seemed like an ideal vehicle for his outrageously authentic Kyrie-ness. In 2012, the team had relocated to Brooklyn from Newark, where it had played as the New Jersey Nets. Since that move, the NBA had embraced a “player empowerment” model that allowed players to transparently chase fame and success rather than tough it out with a crummy franchise, as had been the tradition—perfect for a team now located in the hippest borough of America’s hippest city, with much-publicized ties to its most famous rapper. Despite the fancy rebrand and appeal to player agency, though, the Nets had struggled to build a winning squad—but when Irving and his friend and fellow superstar Kevin Durant joined the team as free agents, this changed. Their talent and big personalities immediately filled a vacuum; as the organization had no real history in Brooklyn and no standard to uphold, Irving and Durant could completely mold the team in their own style.
From the start, the duo also held out the possibility of something more than just winning for the team—their ancillary goal was to inject “a new energy into a city through basketball,” as Durant said on signing with the Nets in 2019. If you squint hard enough, you might conjure a scenario in which these Nets made waves in the NBA, leading to Irving’s outspoken contrarianism and activism becoming more mainstream in the league. But that would work only if they were actually able to play—and win. Yet Durant spent all of his first year with the Nets rehabbing a serious leg injury, while Irving sat out large chunks of the season with his own health issues.
Then came Covid. In March 2020, the NBA became a bellwether for the pandemic’s world-historical implications. Many Americans like myself peg the moment they finally thought “This is for real?” to the night in March when the NBA announced it would be postponing all of its games, effective immediately, after Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid. (In a memorable coincidence, Tom Hanks also announced his positive test that evening.) When the first calls of “We have to get back to normal!” started up a few months later, the NBA decided it could no longer remain inert, but Irving was one of the few players who resisted restarting the season.
In a conference call of NBA and WNBA players, Irving tried—and failed—to convince his peers that they shouldn’t support the bubble. “Kyrie believed Black players needed to put health and safety at a premium in order to fully articulate that their lives mattered,” Sullivan writes. When other players pointed out that refusing to play could lead the NBA’s owners to withhold their salaries for that season and the next, Irving waved off that concern: “I’m willing to give up everything I have,” he asserted. His peers thought he was full of it, or at the very least naive. Some of them didn’t want to be revolutionaries, as Michele Roberts had observed; they just wanted to hoop.
Still, hooping is no solace when your soul is sick. Irving’s anti-bubble stance placed him on the margins of the league, but he was correct in anticipating the tensions and contradictions that would explode within this enclosed environment. Ever since the virus began to move through the United States, the question of how organized sports would deal with it loomed ominously. But the NBA had to find a way—there were fans to please and pricey television contracts to fulfill. So a solution was hatched: For three months that summer, the league’s 22 best teams were invited to live in a hermetically sealed habitat at Disney World, where players would finish the season and the league could declare a champion.