Racial Politics of the NBA 🔗

The Racial Politics of the N.B.A. Have Always Been Ugly

A new book argues that the real history of the league is one of strife between Black labor and white ownership.

“…The basketball press exists mostly to promote the league—it tends to be in sympathy with the management, not the players. In my experience reporting on the N.B.A., I can tell you that there is no other entity that I have encountered—including politicians, police departments, and other sports leagues—that is more needlessly hostile to criticism or which harasses journalists with such consistency.The N.B.A.’s information ecosystem does not run on investigations but, rather, on micro-scoops about meaningless player transactions that get fed to celebrity reporters who mostly seem to exist on Twitter. Not only does this mean that ‘sources,’ who are always unnamed, retain almost unimpeachable power because they are the fountain from which all the ‘valuable’ information flows but it also elbows out nearly anyone who wants to hold the league to account or even cover it from a business or investigative angle….”—Jay Caspian Kang