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MINNEAPOLIS — As it often has since 2020, the NBA finds itself in the middle of an American tragedy. And what’s regarded as the most progressive American sports league took appropriate action.
The NBA postponed the Warriors’ Saturday game against the Timberwolves to prioritize the safety of the Minneapolis community amid unrest in the streets.
On Saturday morning, about two miles from the Target Center, several masked federal agents maced, shot, and killed a man (opens in new tab). Hundreds of protesters gathered around the site, where they were met with pepper spray and teargas bombs.
The deceased was a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and American citizen without prior arrests who had a legal permit to carry a weapon, local officials said. It was at least the third shooting involving federal agents in the city in three weeks, including when an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer killed Renee Good in her car on Jan. 7. That incident set off weeks of protests and calls for the removal of ICE agents deployed to Minneapolis by the Trump administration.
On Friday, the day before the latest shooting, thousands peacefully marched through downtown Minneapolis through -10 degree temperatures, holding ICE OUT signs, praying for those detained, and participating in a general commerce strike that shut down businesses for a day.
Postponing the Warriors-Timberwolves game was one of few levers the NBA has to pull. The league was right to use it. The city of Minneapolis doesn’t need a basketball game tonight, it needs healing. It needs space to breathe. It needs the stage to continue protesting — peacefully.
A moment of silence before the National Anthem wouldn’t have sufficed.
Sports and politics are always intertwined. Just this week, Giants outfielder Jung Hoo Lee was briefly detained by Customs and Border Patrol for a document issue — a minor incident that served as an uneasy harbinger for the upcoming World Cup. One of the biggest cultural issues these days is transgender rights in sports.
Today
3 days ago
Friday, Jan. 16
Everyone should know that this is what President Donald Trump promised (opens in new tab). That his signature bill, which gave ICE more funding than most countries’ military budgets (opens in new tab), empowers this kind of violence and turmoil.
These are the conditions the president and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller want: fear, chaos, situations that could escalate into state-sponsored killings. ICE agents are largely undertrained (opens in new tab) and, promised impunity (opens in new tab), often unequipped to handle the tense situations their actions can create.
“My background is in international humanitarian response in conflict zones,” said Rachel Sayre, director of Minneapolis’s emergency management department. “In Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. What I’ve seen here is what I’ve seen there. A powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people, making them afraid to go outside so they can’t earn a living, so kids are forced out of school. This has a lasting, generational impact.”
Those aren’t the conditions for basketball, they’re the conditions of an authoritarian state clashing with its people.
Playing Saturday’s game might’ve presented the guise that, despite what the news said, everything was business as usual in Minneapolis. It’s not.
Hours before the scheduled tipoff, a group of Target Center employees gathered in silence in the bowels of the arena to watch Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s (opens in new tab)address. (opens in new tab) In Kieran’s Irish Pub, a sports bar attached to the Target Center, the biggest screen wasn’t showing college basketball. It instead displayed Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, standing at a podium and urging protesters to remain peaceful. For a day, the focus didn’t have to be on Anthony Edwards and Steph Curry, but rather their neighbors.
There’s precedent for postponing NBA games. In 2020, teams and players decided not to play playoff games in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Many private corporations have bent the knee to Trump in his second term. (opens in new tab) The NBA doesn’t need to be one of them.
A sports league like the NBA can’t enact policy. It can’t, in this case, halt violence in Minneapolis’s streets. Its actions are somewhat limited to performative gestures like postponing a game.
Those kinds of actions probably have marginal impact, if any at all. But at some point, you do what you can.
There’s an ancient quote from a rabbi about personal responsibility and collective action. I think about it from time to time — increasingly more, as I get older and the world gets darker.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
If not now, when?
It seems like the NBA asked itself those kinds of questions today. We probably all should.