The NBA and NBPA have agreed to postpone today's three playoff games.

Inside the NBA will air at 6:30pm ET on TNT.

Hansen said: “It’s like someone stabbed you and then you’re trying to figure out a way to pull the knife out and move forward. That’s what it feels like. The disrespect was profound to me personally.”

He claimed as a result he would have to “cut 40-50 jobs again.” The ‘again’ part of that came from when he laid off and furloughed staff at the start of the pandemic. As a result, players had to reach into their own pockets to pay the furloughed staff.

After these comments, RSL defender Nedum Onuoha stated: “I don’t want to be here. I’m not here to play for someone who isn’t here to support us.”

After these quotes, RSL players were barred from practice and training today. However, fans and other athletes are standing with RSL. MLS can remove Hansen as an owner if there is a 2/3rds vote by the board of governers.

I originally posted this yesterday (8-27-2020) on my new blog site: https://24seconds48minutes.wordpress.com/2020/08/27/the-nba-strike-a-long-time-coming/.

In Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 23, 2020, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot at seven times at point-blank range by Kenosha police officers. Four of the seven bullets hit Blake, and he is currently paralyzed from the waist down. Yesterday, August 26, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play Game 5 of their series against the Orlando Magic. Other teams scheduled to play yesterday (Rockets, OKC, Lakers, and Blazers) all followed suit and decided to not play their respective games. The decision to strike soon spread across different sporting leagues as the WNBA, MLS, and MLB cancelled their games. Striking, defined as protesting by withholding labor, is a drastic measure, unseen before in the world of sports, and extreme enough to make headlines at The New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox.

The Bucks’ refusal to play could be painted as a last- minute decision; Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported that some players wanted to hear Milwaukee’s explanation for making “an abrupt decision independent of [the] rest of [the] teams to boycott [a] game.” But other players have previously discussed the idea of striking. Earlier this week, Raptors’ guard Fred VanVleet brought up the idea of the Raptors intentionally forfeiting Game 1 in their upcoming series against Boston, saying that NBA players should “actually put something up to lose, rather than just money or visibility.” Even before the NBA Bubble started, Kyrie Irving of the Nets wondered if it was even morally right to resume the NBA season with the Black Lives Matter movement gaining momentum and approval across the nation. Irving reportedly said “Once we start playing basketball again, the news will turn from systemic racism to who did what in the game last night. It’s a crucial time for us to be able to play and blend that and impact what’s happening in our community.”

To accurately trace the NBA’s protest against racial injustice and police brutality, we need to look at a timeline before the NBA Bubble. In 2012, after George Zimmerman murdered Travon Martin, LeBron James, who was on the Miami Heat at the time, tweeted a photo of team’s players wearing hoodies, similar to the outfit Martin was wearing when he was killed, with the hashtag “#WeAreTrayvonMartin.” Then, in 2014, after Eric Garner was murdered by police officers, Derrick Rose, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Garnett, Deron Williams, and LeBron James wore “I Can’t Breathe” warm-up shirts, bringing awareness about Garner’s last words and the officers’ indifference to his pleas for help. After Trump’s election in 2016, a several players and coaches have spoken up about his administration’s controversial policies. Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr has called Trump’s immigration policies “harmful”; former MVP and NBA champion Stephen Curry has gone as far as flat-out saying that Trump is racist. In 2018, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich spoke on the importance of Black History Month, saying “we live in a racist country that hasn’t figured it out yet.” After George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in late May, many NBA players, including Malcom Brogdon, Jaylen Brown, and Klay Thompson, marched in their hometown’s protests for justice. NBA players and coaches have been protesting for years, starting subtle with social media posts and statement shirts, and growing bolder and bolder over time. Their protests have been a slow burn that finally caught fire yesterday as frustration over anti-black racism and police violence- both within the league and across the nation- reached a new peak. During the protests for Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager armed with an AR-15 and white entitlement, killed two civilians. Police were willing to cooperate with Rittenhouse, showing him patience and empathy that Jacob Blake, Treyford Pellerin, and countless others were never given.

The players’ protest has been met with both praise and backlash. A common thread of the criticism is the idea that multi-millionaire athletes should not be complaining; a key example is Jared Kushner saying “NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work.” But NBA players and executives are no strangers to racial profiling. Last week, Masai Ujiri, president of the Toronto Raptors, released video footage of him getting assaulted and cussed at by security guard at last year’s NBA Finals. After the incident, the security guard claimed that Ujiri had instigated the physical contact and even went as far to sue the Raptors’ executive for physical and emotional trauma. In 2018, Bucks’ forward Sterling Brown was tackled, tased, and arrested for parking incorrectly. The most violent incident in recent memory is Thabo Sefolosha getting his legs broken by NYPD in 2015; Sefolosha had to miss an entire season because of the injuries sustained.

The most insidious example of the racism that NBA players and coaches have experienced is the incident involving former Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling. In 2014, Sterling came under fire for making racist comments in conversations to his then-girlfriend; one of his comments that made national news was “it bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people.” Sterling’s anti-black remarks show that racism isn’t just in the police officer you encounter once or in the stranger that clutches their purse when you walk by; it’s in the people you know and work for. This sort of proximity puts the oppressed in a difficult position and burdens them with the responsibility to decide how to handle a conflict that they did not create. In this specific situation, the Clippers were in the middle of the playoffs at the time the story broke. Clippers’ players had to choose between their lifelong dream of winning a championship or their opportunity to call out racism and ask for accountability. The idea of intentionally sitting out and forfeiting a game was discussed. Ultimately, the Clippers chose to follow their playoff aspirations; the extent of their protest was wearing their warm-up shirts inside out during pre-game.