Nation reviewer on two NBA books (one focusing on the Nets): tensions between NBA's progressive image and "its pursuit of profit."

I'm coming a bit late to Jeremy Gordon's review-essay published 9/30/22 in The Nation, A Higher Court, with the subheading "The messy politics of the NBA." 

Then again, his combo review concerns books published in June and May of 2021, respectively, concerning the unusual 2019-20 NBA season, from contretemps in China to the response to COVID (playing in the empty Disney World bubble) to the impact of Black Lives Matter protests on a mostly-Black league. 

Gordon's summary:

Two new books tell the story of the 2019-20 season and its discontents. Matt Sullivan’s Can’t Knock the Hustle is about the [Brooklyn] Nets season that year, but it frequently expounds on the shifting political and economic priorities of the NBA over the past decade and how the players’ ambitions have collided with the realities of the machine. Bubbleball by Ben Golliver is a chronological account of the bubble experience, written by a reporter with a firsthand perspective on how its simmering tensions threatened to dynamite the uneasy situation. Despite these differences in scope, both books come back to the underlying contradiction facing the modern NBA: Beyond its grandstanding public gestures and its players’ and coaches’ tweet-size missives, the NBA is composed mostly of millionaires and billionaires seeking to expand their own bottom lines.

Gordon's further distillation:

The 2019-20 season that followed only heightened the tension between the NBA’s professed image as one of the most progressive leagues in organized sports and its pursuit of profit.

Or, as I put it in my September 2021 review of Sullivan's book, "No progress without profit." (I haven't read Golliver's book, but a quick skim of the e-book shows only a tiny fraction concerns the Nets.)

The tensions

While reviewer Gordon notes that Nets superstar Kyrie Irving was, unusually, willing "to speak out in a moment when everyone in the league was being instructed to just shut up," he also was a flawed messenger, especially given his (post-season) anti-vaccine stance. 

As he writes, Irving's "rebelliousness often does not seem political, but rather the contrarianism of a dorm room debater."

The NBA playoffs in the Bubble stalled after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI, as the players briefly went on strike. Would it continue? Well, former President Barack Obama convinced players to push for some reforms:

From this, three commitments from the team owners were obtained: “the formation of a social justice coalition” made up of players, coaches, and owners meant to advocate for “meaningful police and justice reform”; the use of team-owned arenas as polling locations; and the creation of TV and arena ads meant to turn out voters.,, Nearly two-thirds of NBA arenas became polling places, but the Republican-dominated legislature in Wisconsin rejected any attempts to institute police reform. The so-called social justice coalition has, as of press time, just over 3,000 Twitter followers and has been obstructed by the usual gridlock and partisan grievances.

Gordon observes:

I don’t want to pooh-pooh the short-term gains, because real people worked to achieve them, but this strikes me as a paltry return, measured against the chance to shock and transform the sports firmament. Still, in hindsight, it seems obvious that the NBA’s players, regardless of their expressed politics, were not going to jeopardize their livelihoods in a single moment—that they were not in the same position as Irving, who was not in the bubble in the first place because he was rehabbing a shoulder injury at home.

Nor, I might add, would owners spend more on "social justice" than is abolustely necessary, while anticipating new revenues from sponsorships, TV deals, gambling, and league expansion.