The NBA taking a day off in November won’t encourage more people to vote in the midterm elections, but it’s not meant to. It’s meant to further insulate Commissioner Adam Silver from criticism.
The league announced on Tuesday that no games would be played on Nov. 8. All home teams playing on Nov. 7 will be expected to host election-themed fan nights. Of course, there is no evidence that playing games on Election Day interferes with voting in any way or that a silly, symbolic action by the league will convince people who otherwise weren’t going to vote to do so. That isn’t why the league is doing it.
The league is doing it because it generates good headlines from legacy media. It boosts the social justice credibility of Silver, who is seen by sports media and political media as the cool, woke sports commissioner. Silver is consistently named the best commissioner in American sports because he is “compassionate” and “has a knack for doing the right thing.” He’s a partisan liberal pushing the sports world in a partisan liberal direction. Why wouldn’t the media love him?
This PR campaign is great for Silver on its own, but it serves a special purpose now. Silver is never pressed about the league’s subservience to the Chinese Communist Party. Reporters will ask a handful of questions about China during interviews, but they allow Silver to offer up the same cookie-cutter responses about “values” and how unfair it is for people to criticize the NBA over China.
Silver is never pushed on how hypocritical it is for the league to be in bed with China’s genocidal regime while pushing social justice. He has not even had to answer to the ESPN report that the league was running basketball academies in China where Chinese coaches were physically abusing players. Silver gets to wave his hands in interviews, declare that basic human rights are just “one issue,” and move on to the next softball interview. No one wants to lose the opportunity to interview the cool, woke commissioner turning the NBA into a political social club.
Social justice is Adam Silver’s shield, protecting him and the NBA from any real criticism over the league’s constant capitulation to China and the blatant hypocrisy in the league’s political stances. This is just the latest social justice posturing that will remind journalists how great the NBA is and how little they should care about the league spitting in the face of human rights.
