It appears that George Hill was one of the leaders in the Bucks’ locker room who helped corral his teammates in their decision to strike instead of playing Game 5 of their first-round series against Orlando.
Bucks reporter Zora Stephenson laid out how she could sense that Hill felt powerless being in the Bubble, so far away from the protests of the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin this week. The community that has been protesting since police paralyzed the unarmed Blake by shooting him seven times in the back, and on Wednesday, the Bucks decided how they could impact change even though they were not currently in the area.
“He was angry and emotional and felt like he couldn’t do anything and then realized he could do everything,” Stephenson reported on Fox Sports Wisconsin shortly after the Bucks’ strike led the NBA to postpone Game 5. “That he wasn’t powerless.”
.@ZoraStephenson gives us a look into what was going through the minds of Bucks players in recent days and talks about her own experiences being Black in America. pic.twitter.com/lbKkdejCxu
— FOX Sports Wisconsin (@fswisconsin) August 26, 2020
Stephenson then went on to detail her own experiences with institutionalized racism in Milwaukee, explaining how her husband was overcome with panic about a broken tail light out of fear for the police pulling them over. Stephenson also told the story of her father’s arrest in New York in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
“It is not on us to educate everybody but I’m willing to share that information,” Stephenson said, “and I hope you’re willing to receive it.”
Whatever the next steps are for the NBA players in their strike, which will be determined in a meeting on Wednesday night, they have if nothing else successfully shifted full focus onto this issue and led every major basketball outlet and television partner to have some conversations that are so important to have in a public forum. It’s been a day in which many of these media voices have stepped up to tell their own stories, like Stephenson and Sam Mitchell and Mike Wilbon and many others, furthering this conversation and helping to further amplify and strengthen the players’ message.