Slowly, live professional sports in the United States are resuming action, and tonight’s NBA season restart—following last weekend’s WNBA 2020 tipoff—will complete the hoops circuit.
When we last saw the NBA in action 141 days ago on March 11, the international spotlight fell on Utah Jazz All-Star center, French international Rudy Gobert, whose positive coronavirus test result effectively shut down the league. All other professional sports in the country (and most of the world) rapidly followed suit. While many view Gobert as the NBA’s “Patient Zero,” its important to note that he was just the first to test positive – not necessarily the first NBA player to contract SARS-CoV-2. The Washington Post has this good feature on Gobert and his struggle in the months since that night, and its worth your while.
While I’ve missed the game and the culture around it, I’m keeping a close eye on how players, coaches, and teams will continue to call attention to the social justice issues so many have spoken out about in recent months. For while so much of it is aimed at making the domestic U.S. situation better, recall that the protests and demonstrations against discrimination, racism, and social injustice in the weeks since George Floyd’s death have been worldwide. And in the NBA, where one quarter of the players were born and trained overseas, I’m keen to observe how the informal sports diplomacy conversations that occurred between teammates plays out in this peculiar bubble of a season.
Tonight is a very international restart. Eighty-nine players from 34 different countries will participate in the 22-team bubble in Orlando, broadcast to some 215 countries and territories in multiple languages.
According to NBA International, some of the players have opted to wear social justice messages on their game jerseys in their native languages. I’m keen to see what will appear in Bosnian, French Creole, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latvian, Maori, Slovenian and Spanish, and how the players themselves will talk about their decisions to the press and on their social media accounts.
I’m also hopeful that one day we’ll have a better understanding of how teammates communicated and represented to each other about the social injustices in their home countries. Was it by Zoom or a WhatsApp group text (and if the latter, how could you explain the intricacies involved)? Was it over one of the many bottles of wine that are seemingly ubiquitous at team dinners in the bubble? Or have these issues been parts of earlier pre-COVID-19 conversations informally in locker rooms, team dinners, or social interactions?
Not every country represented in the NBA has a history of athlete protests. Many do not have GOAT-worthy players like Bill Russell or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who decades into their retirement are still out there, advocating for positive change and urging others to take up the mantle. For many countries, athletes who protest to advocate for greater equality or justice is a recent phenomenon, influenced and/or inspired, no doubt, by what they read, see, and think about operating in an Internet-connected, social media-savvy global sports world. Thus, the emergence of international players’ using the NBA limelight to talk about social justice issues is refreshing, and I look forward to how they do so.