It ain’t like we’re curing cancer or anything, we’re watching basketball – Charles Barkley
In the professional sports world last week, the NBA decided to stage a “boycott”. The stated reason was reaction to the recent events in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Not wanting to be shamed by prioritizing sport over racial justice, baseball and hockey followed suit a few days later with their own boycott.
It is fascinating to analyze this situation purely from a business perspective, putting aside just for a moment all the non-sports related events happening simultaneously around us (COVID-19, the election, rioting in big cities). First off, boycotting a business is usually a coercive action by aggrieved customers against a business they find some fault with. In this case however, the NBA players are boycotting their own business. What can possibly be gained from that? One possible explanation is that maybe the players don’t understand the meaning of the word “boycott”. The Meriam Webster dictionary definition is –
to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (a person, a store, an organization, etc.) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions.
We assume NBA teams refusing to play games is an expression of their disapproval of the incident in Kenosha and general inaction on racial injustice. Fair enough, but to who exactly are they expressing their disapproval in order “to force acceptance of certain conditions”?
It’s not the Mayor or Police Chief of Kenosha, the Governor of Wisconsin, or President of the United States. They all have many more immediate and serious issues presently occupying them than whether or not the NBA continues to play. It’s not the fans. Not only are fans not allowed to attend the games because of COVID-19, TV viewership of the NBA is way down. And as the NFL learned the hard way, fans generally don’t respond well to politics or social issues being interjected into the leisure activity of watching sports. It’s not the advertisers. While they might be hurt financially if fans don’t see their ads during a game, they aren’t in a position to do much about racial injustice even if they were “forced”. It’s not the owners. Much like the advertisers, the owners may lose some money from a player boycott. But solving a racial injustice problem, as the players describe it, is far beyond the scope of any individual team owner.
That leaves the league management. This is the only entity that could truly be hurt by a player boycott. After all, if no games are going to be played, the brand suffers tremendously and there becomes little reason even to have a league. It appears that the players finally realized that their own league management was the only organization over which they actually had any leverage. The league ended up agreeing to three main concessions – the formation of a social justice coalition, use of league arenas as possible polling places to vote, and social justice messaging mixed in with product advertising.
In effect, the league committed to infusing more of the same social and political issues into their business that proved so odious to fans and so damaging to the NFL. This is another one of those situations of late that totally defies common sense, or at the very least, business sense.
Currently, the NBA is playing all their games in a bubble. The players’ decision to boycott appears to have been made inside a mental bubble that is shielding them from any awareness of their lack of business leverage in the present context. Despite the blindingly obvious dissolution of the NFL fan base when politics and social issues were force fed into that business by players, the NBA doesn’t believe, or doesn’t care, that the same thing will happen to them.
The fans are the root source of revenue in the sports business model. Advertisers will only pay money to the NBA if there are lots of fans to see their ads. The business needs fans that will pay money in some form by purchasing tickets, merchandise, or advertised products. Do the players somehow believe they are increasing their fan base by pushing social justice grievances as part of their business model? Or maybe the players are convinced that, unlike the NFL, their pre-existing fan base is every bit as desirous of social justice action as they themselves are and won’t be disappointed by a boycott. It is true that the NBA fan base has a greater percentage of African Americans than any other professional sport. But it is a huge risk to assume that every African American fan is so passionate about the social justice cause that they would give up their game watching leisure time in solidarity with the players. This sounds disturbingly like the tacit assumption of Joe Biden and the Democrat Party that black people will automatically support them simply because they are supposed to.
The league management may well recognize this foray into social justice activism is detrimental to the core business of the NBA. But they consistently acquiesce to the reactive impulses of the players at the expense of even the most basic business principles. All this does is inflate the already gigantic egos of the players and further marginalize the role of the league management in running the business.
The NBA is showing us how easily a successful operation can destroy itself by stretching far beyond the bounds of its core mission. This is a real-time example right before our eyes of how not to run a business. The players are mis-reading the cravings and devotion of their fans and are grossly misjudging the leverage they have over anyone beyond their own gutless league management.
And we haven’t even mentioned how the NBA has already tarnished its brand in the eyes of many American fans through its allegiances to Chinese media companies…
5 Responses
Praying that all of these leagues go bankrupt! I’m ‘boycotting’ them, as are many others to retard the politics that have ruined the sports.
Yup, just as a good parent should follow up with punishment for a child that is disobedient and/or disrespectful for no good reason, sports fans must look beyond the current moment to ensure the longer term betterment of sports – sports without politics. I do not yet know any true sport fan that says that politics in sports make the sport more enjoyable – quite the contrary. A parent often contemplates the same dilemma for their child. (e.g. A parent has a child that loves to play a sport and is a star at it, which makes the parent very proud. Pulling the child off the team for continued disobedience or disrespect is very painful for both the child and parent, but not optional for the betterment of the child.)
As a business/political case to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the NBA players, I would liken this NBA stunt to Morton’s Steakhouse letting it’s the customers know they are not serving steak to “boycott” (lol) having too much steak – “we’ll show them what’s good for them and teach them a lesson.” “We’ll show those cattle farmers what’s right.” Huh? Think how racism and/or racial inequality affects basketball. Are the players saying “We’ll show all those racist fans that fill our stands and watch our broadcasts. And we’ll also make the racist league management and racist owners suffer for making our sport the most diverse sport in history of American sports.”
I am sick of politics being injected into sports. I used to look forward to this time of year with the US Open and football (pro and college) heating up. Now I am completely turned off. If these ill informed and uninformed athletes want to take a stand on social issues, they should do it on their own time. I worked for a utility for 38 years. Using my workplace for political expression was never an option or acceptable.
In addition, it is mind boggling how incredibly ignorant many of these athletes are to the “real” situation. They are either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge how rare it is for a police officer to kill an unarmed black person or any person for that matter. They are either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that over the last 20 months about 12,000 blacks were killed by other blacks.
As Stephen Covey says, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
I took a closer look at the details of all of the unarmed blacks that were shot and killed by police in 2019 and through August of 2020. The results………..There were 23 unarmed blacks and 36 unarmed whites shot and killed by police. That statistic is very misleading. Here is a breakdown of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the blacks.
• 20 of the 23 involved officers were responding to a report of a crime, serving a warrant, or responding to a crime in real time. (2 routine traffic stops and a no knock warrant are not included in this category.)
• 21 of the 23 did not obey officer commands.
• 16 of the 23 were resisting arrest.
• 10 of the 23 assaulted, physically struggled with, or threatened the officer(s).
• 2 of the 23 were from a routine traffic stop where the victim appeared to comply.
• 2 of the 23 used their cars as weapons and tried to run over the officers.
• 2 of the 23 had weapons in the car.
• 1 of the 23 was from a no knock warrant were the people thought they were being robbed and fired at the officers.
There is no evidence whatsoever that any of these shootings were racially motivated.
Bottom line, there were only three unarmed blacks that were not involved in criminal behavior and complied with police commands.
When you factor in that police shootings track criminal activity regardless of race, and over 50 percent of violent crime (rapes, murders, assaults) are committed by blacks, statistically unarmed whites are more likely to be shot and killed by police.
A study done by Michigan State and University of Maryland………………..Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland concluded there was “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
The argument that police are targeting blacks because of their race, is just complete garbage.
Rather than the outcry of “hands up, don’t shoot” and “black lives matter,” perhaps the mantra of “comply don’t die” would be better suited to the reality.
I am still waiting to see how the college football will respond. If they go all in for this BS, I’m out.
Ray, your research is right in line with what we have found. There is no racially motivated police campaign to murder black men. It is stunning that once a police involved shooting occurs, the suspect, once he is injured or dead, is suddenly relieved in the eyes of the media, BLM, etc. from any responsibility or agency in the near-fatal or fatal interaction with police. Examine the behaviors of Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake just before shots were fired. Each contributed mightily to their own bad outcome.
Jacob Blake resisted arrest for an open felony sexual assault, 3rd degree, during a 911 call response for domestic disturbance. Officers were called to the seen by the woman he had allegedly once assaulted. Blake resisted arrest. He fought with officers and headlocked one. Tased times two, he eluded the officers and made his way into an SUV which wasn’t his and contained the three vulnerable children of the woman he allegedly assaulted. This is bad behavior, and stupid to boot. Is this how a citizen behaves in order to remain safe and uninjured in the presence of armed police?
Yet all personal responsibility on the part of the citizen is erased. Joe Biden says, “What I saw on that video makes me sick. Once again a Black man, Jacob Blake, has been shot by the police in broad daylight, with the whole world watching.” He goes on to praise Jacob Blake’s resiliency in the face of a long and difficult recovery and decries police racism. Pure phony propaganda.
We are being gaslighted by Biden, BLM, and the media. No matter what ongoing investigations may conclude, Jacob Blake and the men named above were clearly complicit in their own misfortunes.
My favorite thing about the NBA is that the jobs are merit-based. If only all jobs were.
We couldn’t agree more – https://theboxtravels.org/pro-sports-a-working-meritocracy/. And thank you for bravely including the word “almost” in your comment…