A week and a half ago, during Game Four of the first round of the playoffs between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Portland Trail Blazers, the arc of the universe appeared to be bending toward LeBron James. He controlled the game from the start, with balanced hesitations and astonishing accelerations, at times seeming to govern the ball with his gaze. Three minutes in, he let the ball fly from twenty-eight feet—swish. He threw a crisp bounce pass off his hip to a trailing Anthony Davis, made a soaring block, flipped in a reverse layup. The Lakers scored the game’s first fifteen points; at the half, the score was 80–51, Los Angeles. James finished with thirty points and ten assists in twenty-eight minutes, and the Lakers won in a rout. They had seemed out of sorts since play resumed in the bubble in Orlando, but now they looked like the best team in the game, and James looked, once again, like its king.
Afterward, though, James was subdued, as many of his N.B.A. peers have been in their postgame interviews at Walt Disney World. He spoke about what had happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a Black man named Jacob Blake had been shot seven times in the back by a white police officer. “I can’t even enjoy a playoff win right now,” he said. “We are scared as Black people in America.” He went on, “I got half of my brain locked in on the playoffs and the other half locked in on how I can help Black people become greater in America.”
The bubble, for many players, had come to feel like a gilded cage. Some players said that they couldn’t focus on basketball at all—the Toronto Raptors guard Fred VanVleet raised the possibility of a walkout; the Boston Celtics swingman Jaylen Brown said that he wanted to go protest. As part of the arrangement that the players agreed to before the bubble games began, the N.B.A. had sanctioned certain efforts to call attention to racism: putting messages on the backs of jerseys, printing “Black Lives Matter” on the court. This no longer felt like enough. “We shouldn’t have came to this damn place to be honest,” the Milwaukee Bucks guard George Hill said.
In June, the Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving organized a conference call of around eighty players who were concerned that basketball would distract from the social-justice work and protests that had swelled in the late spring and early summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. Would the N.B.A. really provide the best platform for such work, while also trying to provide entertainment to mostly white audiences? “Something smells a little fishy,” Irving said, according to the Athletic. James was not on the call; separately, the Athletic reported that James believed playing in Orlando would not “deter his ability to continue inspiring change.” As stories appeared elsewhere in the media indicating that other players were less sure, the Los Angeles Clippers’ Patrick Beverley tweeted, “Hoopers say what y’all want. If @KingJames said he hooping. We all hooping. Not Personal only BUSINESS 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾 #StayWoke ✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿.”
It may be hard to remember now—four years after Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem, three months after the Floyd protests began, and a week after the Bucks refused to play in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake—just how striking it was when LeBron James first started to speak out, in various ways, about racist violence and police brutality. The N.B.A. was arguably still living in the shadow of Michael Jordan, who had adopted a publicly apolitical posture; the league’s most popular superstar in the early two-thousands was Kobe Bryant, a Jordan acolyte who often talked about winning as if it were the only referendum that counted. But after Trayvon Martin was killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman who was suspicious of his hoodie, in 2012, James and his Miami Heat teammates put on hoodies and took a team photo to show solidarity with those angered by the killing. “From that point on,” James said later, “I knew that my voice and my platform had to be used for more than just sports.” In 2014, after a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death in New York, James and Irving, who had become teammates in Cleveland, wore “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts during warmups. And as James amassed more power in the league, and in the entertainment industry, and more control over his image, he foregrounded a commitment to social justice—the slogan of one of his media companies is “More than an athlete.” Even as an athlete, James pushed for a greater degree of self-determination, doing more than anyone in the N.B.A. to cultivate “player empowerment,” the idea that athletes should have more control over their labor.
He constructed his career as a kind of virtuous cycle: winning brought fame and wealth, which could be used, in part, to support his community, particularly in his home town of Akron, Ohio. James has spent millions of dollars on behalf of his I Promise public school and its accompanying mentorship program, adult-education classes, and food pantry. In June, he led a group of prominent Black athletes and celebrities in establishing More Than a Vote, an organization dedicated to protecting the voting rights of African-Americans. James has frequently cited Muhammad Ali as an influence—he even produced a documentary about the boxer, for which he won a sports Emmy. But where Ali was a firebrand, James is a businessman, and there is a synergy between James’s social-justice efforts and his commercial interests that was largely unthinkable in Ali’s day. James’s I Promise school appeared in a Nike commercial.
In 2018, James signed a four-year, $153.3-million contract with the Lakers; it was widely noted at the time that he was clearly being underpaid. (The N.B.A.’s collective-bargaining agreement includes maximum salaries that cannot be exceeded.) And his influence extends beyond the league’s finances. During his career—and especially since Adam Silver became the commissioner, in 2014—the N.B.A. has come to tout its own progressive values, shaping the league’s image in line with that of its biggest global superstar.
This season has tested those commitments in multiple ways. This past October, the Houston Rockets’ general manager, Daryl Morey, angered Chinese fans, businesses, and the Chinese government when he tweeted his support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; the N.B.A. lost hundreds of millions, and the league’s official response in the immediate aftermath seemed mealymouthed rather than principled. (LeBron’s own reaction did not get high marks, either.) Then came the pandemic, and the protests, and the creation of the bubble. There were serious questions about whether the league’s financial imperatives would clash with the players’ desire to reckon with racial inequality in a way that might make the league’s majority-white audience uncomfortable, or spook sponsors invested in the status quo. But cancelling the season would have been financially catastrophic for both sides. The N.B.A. made a pitch to the players: what was good for the N.B.A. was good for them—and could be good for America. Social justice would be front and center.
For a while, it seemed to work. James was one among many players who spoke to the press at length about civil rights, and repeatedly called for justice for Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police officers in her home, in Louisville, Kentucky. Perhaps inevitably, though, the league’s restrictions—the messages on the jerseys, for instance, had to be chosen from an approved list—at times made the whole affair seem sanitized, a simulacrum of real protest. (James, for one, chose not to put a message on his jersey.) And, as the games went on, with their thrilling endings and dazzling performances by young stars, attention drifted, somewhat, from calls for justice and equality. When video of the Blake shooting appeared online, the players’ gestures seemed futile.
Then the Bucks decided not to play at all—and that decision felt different. It was not widely coördinated or announced ahead of time. It was hugely disruptive. Like many seminal protests, it was grounded more in conviction than in strategy—the players had a purpose, not a plan. Supporting one another, and signalling their fury that another Black man had been unjustly shot, was worth whatever consequences might come. The Bucks did not tell their opponents, or the league office, or the union, or LeBron James. Instead, they called Wisconsin’s attorney general and lieutenant governor, and asked what could be done.
James was one of the first players to tweet his support for the Bucks’ collective action: “FUCK THIS MAN!!!! WE DEMAND CHANGE. SICK OF IT.” He called a team meeting. The Lakers were taking a pre-game nap, and the team’s “executive administrator of player programs and logistics”—James’s chief of staff, who has one of the team’s coveted spots in the bubble—went from room to room, rousing everybody. James told the others that they shouldn’t play either; soon, all the games that night had been postponed. Teams and players in other sports quickly decided that they, too, would sit out. There was a sense of history unfolding.
But not smoothly. After the games had been postponed, all the players in the bubble gathered, for the first time, to discuss whether to resume playing. The meeting, according to the league’s official statement, was “impassioned.” James, according to some accounts, was, along with a handful of other players, not happy about being blindsided by the Bucks’ decision. More than that, he was frustrated, he later said, by the absence of a plan behind the impulsive strike. “That’s where my mind went to,” he told reporters later. “At one point there was no plan of going forward. There was no plan of action. Me, personally, I’m not that type of guy. I’m not a guy that doesn’t have a plan and then is not ready to act on it.”
During the meeting, James reportedly focussed on pressuring the owners to do far more than they have. All thirty teams have committed three hundred million dollars across the next ten years toward a foundation empowering the Black community—small change, considering that twenty-two of the league’s owners are billionaires. A million dollars a year is a rounding error for the Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, one of the richest men in the world. The DeVos family, which owns the Orlando Magic, has spent millions of dollars promoting right-wing causes and candidates; Betsy DeVos is a member of Trump’s Cabinet. Quicken Loans, the company run by Dan Gilbert, who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, donated seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Trump’s Inauguration fund, and, shortly afterward, benefitted from a tax break originally intended to help the poor. Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets, is a Trump supporter who furloughed roughly forty thousand employees from his casino-and-restaurant empire during the shutdown. Tom Gores, who owns the Detroit Pistons, has made billions in private equity, and frequently donates to Democratic candidates; his firm owns companies that contract with law-enforcement agencies and Border Patrol, including one that makes its money by charging incarcerated people exorbitant rates and fees to make phone calls.
The owners have the means and moral obligation to address white supremacy and structural racism; unlike the players, they are rarely, if ever, put on the spot. James, on the other hand, makes headlines nearly every time he speaks. In the players’ meeting, the Lakers and Clippers reportedly voted to end the season; the other teams voted to keep playing. Then James, followed by his teammates and the Clippers, walked out.
As details about the meeting leaked, it was unclear, from the outside, what James was up to. Was he taking radical action, declaring that this moment of national crisis was not the time for games? Was he trying to create leverage with the owners, putting the season into jeopardy? Was he simply frustrated? The next day, reports emerged that he had gone to his room and, with a small group of fellow-players, had called Barack Obama. This did not feel surprising: Obama, in addition to being the forty-fourth President, is a basketball fan and a one-time organizer, and one of the few men who can rival James for public stature. Obama is also a man who seems unlikely to capsize a boat without counting the life rafts. He reportedly encouraged James and the others to push for the formation of a social-justice council, to create a context for the strike, and to resume playing.
By Thursday morning, as James told the Athletic’s Joe Vardon, “I came up with a plan.” The plan was in line with Obama’s suggestions—it included the creation of a social-justice council—and also with the efforts of More Than a Vote. Players would insist that owners who control stadiums allow those stadiums to become voting centers. “Homecourt!!!” James tweeted, after the Lakers announced that they would be participating. “Change isn’t made sitting on the sidelines 🙏🏾✊🏾👑 @morethanavote #BlackLivesMatter.”
This commitment could make a difference in some cities, where access to polls, particularly for Black voters, is increasingly threatened. But not everyone is satisfied by this outcome—and some of the most conspicuous notes of skepticism have been struck by younger players. “I think promises are made year after year,” Jaylen Brown, who’s twenty-three, said on a Zoom conference call on Saturday. “We’ve heard a lot of these terms and words before. We heard them in 2014: ‘Reform.’ We’re still hearing them now.” Brown went on, “Everybody keeps saying, ‘Change is going to take this, change is going to take that.’ That’s the incrementalism idea that keeps stringing you along to make you feel like something’s going to happen, something’s going to happen. People were dying in 2014, and it’s 2020 and people are still dying the same way. They keep saying, ‘Reform, reform, reform,’ and ain’t nothing being reformed. I’m not as confident as I would like to be.”
Perhaps there was a moment there in that ballroom, during the player-wide meeting, when the question of who would shape the future of the N.B.A. felt unsettled, when it seemed uncertain whether James’s voice carried the same authority it has for a decade now, or if a new generation of players, accustomed to the platform he helped build, might take the mantle. Whatever happened, the moment seems to have been smoothed over; the games restarted. It’s not personal, as Beverley said, only business. On Friday, the Lakers will take on Tilman Fertitta’s Rockets in the second round of the playoffs. On the line in these playoffs, for James, is a trip to his tenth N.B.A. finals, and the chance to win his fourth championship. He has always understood the currency of winning, and he is still, at thirty-five years old, one of the best players in the world—perhaps, when it counts most, the very best. James has said that he’d like to be an N.B.A. owner someday. Representation matters, and there is no doubt that James would use his clout to challenge his cohort. But it feels more notable than ever that one of his desired endgames is, it seems, a kind of enlightened feudalism. The King’s aim isn’t to topple the ownership structure, but to bend it from the top.
