Defund the NBA

By User:Austin Bjornholt - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2562480


I grew up in Indiana until right around my 16th birthday, and basketball is the "national sport" of the State of Indiana. Having lived in the boring part of the state, there wasn't much else to do except play basketball for most kids. Unfortunately I didn't have regular access to a hoop with a good surface, so I never became very good at anything other than shooting free throws. Nor was I athletic in most respects anyway. At some point, my family put up a backboard, but the gravel was so deep and soft that dribbling was futile. Not being good enough to play, I learned to keep statistics for the junior high and freshman teams. Being present at practices, and having been privy to the charts and documentation, really taught me how a lot about how organized basketball is played and coached.

In that era, everybody in Indiana watched basketball, and the high school game was a culturally important phenomenon. The obvious comparison would be to the importance of high school football in the state of Texas. Basketball remained important to me all the way into college, even after we moved to the South, where it is a marginal sport.

The point of all this, is that basketball is pretty important to me as a form of entertainment. I really get into the college game, and have attended dozens of games in person. Professional basketball is a different matter.

I've never engaged with the NBA. It may have been a good game at one time, but the culture degraded after they lengthened the games to drive TV revenue, and it became a slow, loping, undisciplined version of the sport. Then came the literal gang members wearing their gang colors at press conferences, and the record deals, and the NBA morphed into something resembling professional wrestling. It's tacky, cartoonish. The current century version of NBA features dramatic soap opera storylines involving personal rivalries and contrived racial disputes.

The NBA has significant financial interests in the Peoples Republic of China, an authoritarian state. When criticized for it, the NBA took the position of echoing China's official criticisms of the United States. NBA leadership literally sided with a powerful enemy of the USA. Comments and tweets flowed from players and coaches, so it's obvious that the NBA distributed talking points. These sound like they were adapted from official propaganda from the Communist Party of China. Recently, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks announced they would no longer play the national anthem before the games. He claims it's "hurtful" to too many people. Hurtful to whom? His handlers? It's disgraceful.

The NBA is operating like a paid agent of an enemy state. Presumably this is being done for profit and not ideology. Follow the money. I certainly hope the FBI and NSA are taking a very close look at anyone of significance in the NBA who has echoed talking points taken straight from the propaganda of a hostile power.

As entertainment, it's trashy melodrama. Liking the NBA is like hanging a velvet portrait of Elvis on the wall, or wearing a bright red suit to a funeral. The politics of the NBA seem to be those of a hostile foreign state that is ruled by an authoritarian regime. The NBA is a degrading form of entertainment, and people who like it have poor taste. It is a league consisting of, and for, trash. Don't be trash. Don't watch the NBA. Don't give them your money or the screen views and clicks.

Defund the NBA.

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