The NBA Playoffs got put on hold on Wednesday after the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play in their Game 5 against the Magic, protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Bucks stayed in their locker room, calling Wisconsin’s attorney general and lieutenant governor to determine what action they could take — the result has been Wisconsin’s state legislature being called back into a special session to vote on a police reform bill.
In the aftermath, the remainder of the league’s teams chose to join the Bucks in protest by refusing to play their games and the NBA was forced to postpone action indefinitely. After player meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, the decision to resume play was made but players pushed ownership to do more, resulting in the formation of a social justice coalition and a pledge to turn every arena owned by the team owners to be turned into a voting center.
It’s the start of some change, and if nothing else the resulting dialogue of the last two days has been some of the best conversations around race, racism, and policing on any television networks, much less on sports TV. On Saturday, games will resume with the Wednesday slate of Bucks-Magic, Thunder-Rockets, and Lakers-Blazers, as the league announced on Friday afternoon.
The NBA’s schedule for playoff games Saturday and Sunday is out and official at last: pic.twitter.com/qQFo0e7abX
— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) August 28, 2020
The Sunday games likewise are just the Thursday schedule, pushed back, with ESPN and TNT splitting the action. The league will continue to rewrite the schedule going forward, but one can expect the same format of teams playing every other day as it had been prior to the protest stoppage.