He also solidified his claim as one of the game’s all-time greatest players. By leading the Lakers to victory against the feisty Miami Heat-the team with which he won his first two rings-James completed his mission to restore the storied franchise to its past glory. It was a made-for-TV moment: LeBron James captured his fourth title and, more historically, did it with his third team. One where players have more collective power.On the second Sunday in October, an unprecedented 12 months after the National Basketball Association’s 74th season tipped off with preseason games, the league finally crowned a champion-the Los Angeles Lakers. ![]() In fact, this feels like the beginning of an entirely new league. The change James and NBA players seek doesn’t end with the season. Inside the bubble, he’s become a lodestar of transcendence more than a metaphor, he’s the real thing. ![]() This will be his ninth finals appearance in 10 years, and he’s doing it with his third NBA team. LeBron James is again at the throne of history. The finals are now underway the Lakers play the Miami Heat in Game 2 tonight, which means the NBA’s great experiment is coming to an end. ![]() The year has been relentless in its rush to shock, to throw each of us off balance, and the players' strike will endure long past 2020 as a testament to the kind of unity, courage, and virtue these dizzy, fiery times call for. The bubble succeeded not because of what it kept out but because of what it let in-the real-life concerns of its players. The magic of what makes this experiment a bona fide triumph is how vulnerable, how open, its players have been during their time there. But its failure is also proof of all that it accomplished. Those feats were not enough to keep the outside world at bay. “FUCK THIS MAN!!!!,” tweeted LeBron James, the league’s blockbuster athlete and, within the universe of the NBA, a constellation unto himself. But in the whiplash 24 hours that followed the strike, the most outspoken response came from the inside. “It’s amazing to me why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back,” Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers said when asked about Blake’s shooting in a postgame interview the night before the strike.īy Thursday of that week, as the league and players finalized details to resume play, the strike had snowballed into other sports leagues, which were joining in-Major League Baseball, the Women’s National Basketball Association, even tennis star Naomi Osaka, who would go on to win this year’s US Open. ![]() The sentiment wasn’t just one held among players. Fed up and with few options, players did what was in their immediate power: They chose not to step onto the court.įor DeMar DeRozan, the San Antonio Spurs small forward, the root of the strike was about a cause “bigger than basketball” “Whoever don’t understand that is part of the problem,” he said in a tweet as news spread across social media. The decision to strike was also the result of everything that came before it: Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ferguson in 2014, and a lifetime’s worth of dead Black people killed as a consequence of how racism works in this upside-down country of ours. Black players account for 75 percent of the league, and reeling from another devastating realization that the color of their skin makes them easy target practice in America, they decided enough was enough.īlake’s shooting was the final turning point, but the action wasn’t just about him. Three days later and 1,200 miles south, in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, the players of the NBA launched a work stoppage in response. A video of the incident went viral, and overnight the city transformed into yet another nerve center for the Black Lives Matter movement. Just past 5 pm on August 23, Jacob Blake was shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
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