Game 5 of the first round of the NBA Eastern Conference Playoff series has been put on hold. The Milwaukee Bucks refused to take the court in protest of the Aug. 23 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Bucks arena is roughly 40 miles from where the shooting took place. According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the Bucks players had a very serious discussion before Wednesday night’s game and decided not to leave the locker room shortly before tipoff.
The Milwaukee Bucks lead the Orlando Magic three games to one in the best-of-seven series. After Game 4, during the postgame press conference, Bucks guard George Hill called the video of Blake’s shooting “sickening.” Hill continually refocused media questions about the game on the Blake shooting, as well as the continuing injustice seen by Black Americans around the country at the hands of law enforcement.
Here’s footage of both the Milwaukee Bucks and the Orlando Magic not taking the floor.
The Bucks have an intimate history of Black Lives not Mattering to local police. In January 2018, Bucks guard Sterling Brown was harassed and assaulted by Milwaukee police. Body camera footage of the event released four months later made it clear that the only person not escalating that terrible event was Sterling Brown. After months of political pressure was applied, Milwaukee police fired the offending officer—but not for the egregious violence he perpetrated against an innocent citizen.
Chris Haynes of Yahoo! Sports published a story earlier Wednesday about NBA players and their feelings about being sequestered in the Disney Coronado Springs Resort “bubble.” This is the area where the entire league has been playing games and practicing as a result of our current pandemic. Players recently began assembling and “seeking guidance on the logistics of potentially boycotting games” to deal with the trauma of having to watch yet another Black person get brutalized. This sentiment was supported by a post-game interview with George Hill, where he openly questioned whether or not moving the entire league into the Florida bubble had not hurt the BLM movement by taking “all the focal points off what the issues are.”
The NBA, led in no small part by its superstar athletes, has been very vocal about its support for the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice.
LeBron James—arguably the game’s most famous player—did not mince words with his feelings.
On Tuesday, James told reporters that they might be tired of him having to repeat himself, but “Black men, Black women, Black kids, we are terrified. Because you don’t know. You have no idea. You have no idea how that cop that day left the house. You don’t know if he woke up on the good side of the bed. You don’t know if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. You don’t know if he had an argument at home with his significant other, you don’t know if one of his kids said something crazy to him and he left the house steaming—or maybe he just left the house saying ‘Today is going to be the end for one of these Black people.’ That’s what it feels like.”
As reports began to filter out that the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder players were also planning to strike during their own Game 5 on Wednesday night, as well as James’ L.A. Lakers and the Portland Trailblazers, the NBA pre-empted them.
Watch George Hill steering this press conference to Jacob Blake and police violence writ large—and the reporters who failed (or refused) to comply.
And here’s a reminder:
