NBA Is Riddled With Woke Turmoil
The NBA’s COVID-shortened season may soon get even shorter.
It all began Wednesday afternoon when the Milwaukee Bucks announced that the team would be boycotting Game 5 of its first-round playoff series against the Orlando Magic. The perpetually woke NBA quickly responded in predictable fashion:
The NBA said it's postponing Game 5 of three different series in response to the Milwaukee Bucks decision to boycott their playoff game following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in the team's home state of Wisconsin https://t.co/lf2nKDb0ZG
— CNN (@CNN) August 27, 2020
Things escalated from there, as a league meeting about how to proceed quickly turned into a conversation about taking the protest to the next level and calling off the rest of the season.
Thursday’s NBA playoff schedule, and perhaps the entire playoffs, still hang in the balance, as a meeting of NBA players and coaches Wednesday failed to reach a concensus on next steps.
One top NBA writer said the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers both voted to end the season without continuing. The other teams allegedly wanted to play on.
Wednesday’s NBA playoff games were postponed when the Milwaukee Bucks – the team nearest Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the Jacob Blake shooting incident that sparked protests and looting took place – decided not to play their game. The NBA has not said when those games would be made up.
Players and coaches met for three hours today without reaching a conclusion, and discussed whether the season should continue. A person with knowledge of the meeting told the Associated Press that no decisions were reached.
Professional basketball has become such a watered-down, almost defense-free game that there are a lot of old-school basketball fans who wouldn’t miss the rest of this season at all.
The ridiculous thing here is that anyone involved with the National Basketball Association fancies themselves to be occupying any kind of moral high ground. The league is so in bed with communist China that players and coaches are afraid to say anything in support of Hong Kong’s anti-government protesters. It’s been embarrassing watching them kowtow to the ChiComs, especially during the Chinese bat-flu pandemic.
The NBA has more woke tendencies than most other pro sports leagues so it is unlikely that a cancellation of its season will give the NFL, MLB, or NHL any ideas. In this weirdest of years and wokest of times, however, who the heck knows?
We Don’t Need This Anymore
During our VIP Gold live chat on Wednesday, Stephen Green, Bryan Preston and I were talking about how this plague has taught us that we can live without sports. Bryan and Steve were a little more on board with the idea than I was, but I still agreed that I’m finding out my addiction may indeed be curable.
As I have written many times, sports are supposed to be my happy place, a distraction from the real world. I’m a grown-up who knows very well what is going on in the world. I don’t need a bunch of 25-year-old millionaires taking a knee on their piles of cash to introduce awareness or poignancy into my life.
Good riddance if the NBA wants to peace-out for the year. That doesn’t mean I am insensitive to what is going on in America right now, it just means that I’m tired of the tendency to politicize everything these days.
And I’m not the only one.
Trump-Hating NBA Gives Commie China a Hug
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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear twice a week.
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