The NBA undermines its progressive values by standing up for tone-deaf anthem rule

At first blush, the NBA’s decision to maintain its mandate that players and team staff stand for the national anthem before games comes off as tone-deaf.

It comes off as tone-deaf at second and third blush, too.

The league believes it found itself in an intractable situation amid a feud between President Donald Trump and some of the NBA’s best players, including LeBron James and Stephen Curry. No NBA players kneeled during the anthem last season. But watching the NFL land in a culture war with Trump made NBA commissioner Adam Silver fear the same for his league.

The NBA’s franchise owners, who met Thursday and Friday in New York, could have abolished the rule, quietly or otherwise. But doing so may have increased pressure on players to kneel, as increasing numbers of NFL players have done over the last two weeks. That’s a fair concern, though LeBron has said he won’t kneel. The Warriors stood for the anthem before Saturday’s preseason opener.

Still, few would question their chops when it comes to expressing resistance to Trump. LeBron won’t kneel, but he did call the President a “bum.”

Silver has previously indicated that he does not plan to actually fine any player who kneels, despite his authority to do so. But he made three key mistakes in responding to the firestorm sparked by Trump’s intersection with pro sports.

Mistake No. 1: Weak response to Trump’s Warriors disinvitation

The league’s response to the President of the United States refusing to invite the Warriors to the White House, and specifically calling out Stephen Curry, was disappointing. I wrote about that in depth last week.

Mistake No. 2: Silver’s “expectation” players would stand

On Thursday, Silver said his “expectation” is that players will stand for the national anthem. This may have been poor word choice. Based on the fact that no players kneeled last season and top players have said they will continue to stand, Silver could have meant that his “presumption” is that players will stand.

But he didn’t say that — he said it was his “expectation.” When you’re the commissioner of a league talking about rules, the specific words you use matter a great deal. So every headline on every story about Silver’s comments included a version of the most newsworthy word: expectation.

This is an unforced error that set the tone for what came next.

Mistake No. 3: The memo

The now-infamous memo, first reported by ESPN’s Zach Lowe and published in full on SBNation.com, discusses productive ways in which teams might address players and fans on various issues. The buzzword is unity, and options include boosting community involvement and issuing statements before home openers.

But down at the bottom, the memo reminds teams — and by extension, players — of the mandate to stand for the anthem. It also notes that teams do not have license to establish their own rules regarding the anthem.

There was really no good reason to mention the rule in the memo. The NBA community had been talking about it all week, and the franchise owners talked about it and related issues for hours at their meetings. It would have been smarter to simply mention that no team could punish players for respectful actions taken during the anthem, or to leave it out completely.

Yet it was included, drawing fire on Silver.

Now the real trouble begins.

The discussions the NBA doesn’t really want to have

The first suggestion mentioned in the NBA’s memo is to organize “discussions between players, coaches, general managers, and ownership to hear the players’ perspective.”

Does the NBA really want to see LeBron James and Dwyane Wade sit down with Cavaliers team owner Dan Gilbert to talk about white supremacy in America? Gilbert, a 55-year-old man from Detroit who donated $750,000 to Trump’s inauguration, only learned that racism lives in America this week, and only because he got those racist voicemails. (He apparently didn’t connect racist graffiti on LeBron’s residence to the presence of racism in America. Huh.)

Given that ignorance, you wonder how useful or candid such a conversation with players could be. You also wonder how willing Gilbert would be to discuss the deleterious impacts of his mortgage company’s shady tactics on communities of color.

You wonder how comfortable Pistons franchise owner Tom Gores will be discussing his $1.6 billion purchase of Securus Technologies, a company that charges families of Michigan prison inmates a reported $1.50 per minute for phone calls. How do you have a chat about unity with a boss who in his spare time profits off the disproportionate exploitation of black families?

Spurs CEO Julianna Holt donated $500,000 to Trump’s campaign. Now consider one of Spurs coach Gregg Popovich’s many comments on media day.

“I wonder what the people think about who voted for [Trump], where their line is, how much they can take, where does the morality and decency kick in?”

Does the NBA really want Popovich to ask Holt that question in a public forum?

Donald Sterling was cartoonishly racist. As such, building consensus around his ejection from the NBA was an easy call. Don’t forget that LeBron declared Sterling had no place in the league, players were considering a playoff walk-out, and sponsors had mobilized heavily before Silver banned Sterling. Silver still had to make the call and bring 29 other NBA team owners along for the ride, and he deserves credit for that.

This is much harder. Everything is rightfully raw. The league is doing its best to navigate the minefields. But beyond the anthem, beyond the calls for unity, there’s so much difficult work to do within the NBA and outside of it. The league’s efforts to guide teams and players through it all over the past week have not been encouraging.

This is not to say that the NBA’s focus on unity isn’t appropriate, or that the league isn’t doing enough to have the conversations we need to have in this country. Silver’s decision to work with Spike Lee and Everytown on Christmas Day spots on ending gun violence was bold. Monday marked International Wrongful Conviction Day; five NBA players and coaches, including Popovich, recorded messages on the topic. Silver pulled the 2017 NBA All-Star Weekend out of Charlotte because of North Carolina’s anti-LGBTQ law, a bold step that led to other businesses down the same path.

Silver also elected to announce that All-Star would be in Charlotte in 2019 after the North Carolina legislature passed a highly underwhelming reform to that troubling law. This misstep threatened to undo the good the NBA had done to pressure reform in the first step.

So does this anthem stance.

All the good work the NBA is doing on social issues will be overshadowed the first time a player tests Silver’s anthem rule and we all look expectantly at the commissioner to see what he’ll do. It didn’t have to be this way.