The NBA Wants You To Vote Harder
Where players can take the league's commitments to civic engagement
Dear readers,
Before we get to our lead story this week, a couple of pieces of housekeeping. First, Calder went on AMF Track Club—a podcast hosted by our friends Khalil and Jake—to chat about Formula 1 and Dr. Oz’s crudité. It’s a great podcast even when one of us isn’t on—you can listen here.
Also, we want to provide a quick update on a story that we covered a few weeks ago.
On Thursday, the NFL and NFL Players Associated announced a settlement in Deshaun Watson’s disciplinary suit, agreeing to suspend Watson — who is accused of sexually harassing over 24 women — for 11 games without pay and fine him $5 million (or about 2 percent of his current $230 million deal with the Cleveland Browns). The settlement came after the NFL appealed a previous ruling by the league’s chief disciplinary officer, who recommended a six-game suspension and no fine.
In the press release announcing the deal, the NFL pretty shamelessly washed its hands of the matter, declaring, “Today's announcement concludes the [disciplinary] process.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is that. As we predicted a few weeks ago, the NFL got what it wanted: the chance to publicly play the Stern Disciplinarian and Unchallenged Moral Authority without having to take any real steps to address the underlying failures of its disciplinary system. Watson’s beefed-up suspension is still more lenient than the punishments that the NFL has doled out to players who betted on games or — God forbid — smoked pot.
In any event, let’s turn our attention from the sporting world’s most reactionary league to one of its more socially-conscious ones: the NBA, which made headlines this week for a surprise announcement about its upcoming season calendar.
-Ian and Calder
The NBA’s “civic day of engagement” gives players an inch. They should take a mile.
When professional sports leagues do something civically minded, there’s typically a deeper reason for it — and that reason, almost always, is money.
Take, for instance, MLB’s decision to move its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta after the Georgia legislature passed new voting restrictions. A good-faith demonstration of support for voting rights? Nope — a last-ditch effort to placate the league’s corporate sponsors.
Or what about the NCAA’s decision to allow college athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness? Motivated by concern for the economic well-being of its athletes? Also nope. Fear over protracted — and very expensive — anti-trust lawsuits.
So when the NBA announced this week that it won’t host games on Election Day this year in a bid to encourage fans to vote in the upcoming midterm elections, we were left scratching our heads. What’s the payoff? Where’s the shadowy corporate sponsor? Has Dark Brandon gotten to them too?
O.K. — maybe we’re being needlessly cynical, but at least our skepticism is well-founded. After two or so years of watching professional sports leagues slowly retreat from the commitments that they’ve made to advance racial and economic justice — or, at best, cloak their self-interested financial decisions in the language of civic-mindedness — our expectations are pretty low.
In this case, the explanation for the NBA’s unprecedented step of canceling games on Election Day is pretty straightforward. In 2020, following the player-led wildcat strike that shut down the league for several days, the NBA and the NBA Players Association created the new National Basketball Social Justice Coalition, which is a group of players, coaches, team governors, and executives charged with executing the league’s social justice commitments. Much of the coalition’s work has been focused on supporting voting rights, and it has led to some significant wins. During the 2020 election, the coalition helped turn several NBA stadiums into polling stations, and in May 2021, the coalition publicly endorsed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — another unprecedented step for a sports league.
Although the announcement about the new “civic day of engagement” came out of the NBA proper rather than the Social Justice Coalition, it’s pretty clear that the decision was a byproduct of the coalition’s work. This is what more player control over leagues looks like, and it is good.
Of course, there are limits to the NBA’s latest initiative. In its announcement, the league framed the off-day as an effort to promote “nonpartisan civic engagement” and encourage fans to participate in the democratic process — which is a bit of a tricky needle to thread when one of the two major parties has built its political strategy around discouraging civic engagement and undermining the democratic process. At this point in America’s democratic decline, the primary threat to the country’s electoral system doesn’t come from low turnout, and the NBA, if it really wanted to level with its fans, could candidly acknowledge that.
Still, we have little expectation — or, honestly, hope — that the NBA will start to endorse candidates in key races or sound the alarm to the GOP’s increasingly authoritarian impulses. Suggesting that a shadowy-by-nature sports league throw its weight behind specific people running for office could have some unfortunate unintended consequences.
But what about the league’s players, coaches, and staff? The NBA says that its day off will serve as a reminder to its fans to go out and vote. For those actually involved in the daily functions of the NBA, though, it is quite literally a league-wide day off. Players could use it to work out or spend time with their families, or they could take the spirit of the day one step further. They could lead voting drives, bus people to polls (and take a selfie or two with those waiting on line), and do their part to support candidates who want to protect — or even expand! — democracy.
Instead of insisting that “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” the players could use the inch they got from the league to take a mile. Certainly not every NBA player is deeply engaged with electoral politics, and we’re not expecting one endorsement from a celebrity (and/or bench player) to swing a race. These actions would, however, help re-enforce the new model of political engagement that emerged among players during the 2020 election. Instead of just plastering “VOTE” on some promotional materials, the players could explain why voting for certain candidates matters to them.
Who knows if the league meant to crack open this door to players. But either way, NBA players — particularly those who have expressed their support for social justice issues in the past — should step through it.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . a consequential ruling in Utah? “Transgender girls allowed to play girls’ sports in Utah, judge rules,” by Glynn A. Hill in The Washington Post (August 21, 2022).
. . . a primer on Vanessa Bryant’s lawsuit against Los Angeles? “Vanessa Bryant Is Suing L.A. County Over Kobe Bryant Crash Photos: What to Know,” by Jonathan Abrams in The New York Times (August 19, 2022).
. . . the hollowness of Deshaun Watson’s punishment? “Deshaun Watson is the star the NFL deserves: A cynical, empty narcissist,” by Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post (August 18, 2022).