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The playoffs will continue Saturday, three days after players walked out. As part of the agreement, the league committed to a new series of social justice efforts. More

The rookie guard has been stellar for a moribund Atlanta Dream team, motivated by being overlooked. People “have always slept on me,” she said. More

The Los Angeles Sparks have a roster filled with All-Star forwards. In her second year, Anigwe is using their example as preparation to contribute to a championship run whenever she can. More

“At some point,” said John Henson, who was racially profiled in Wisconsin in 2015, “it needs to be a loud enough message so that everyone says, ‘Hey, this is not OK.’” More

It was the silence that spoke loudest.No basketballs pounding on hardwood. All games canceled. No baseballs cracking off bats. Three games canceled. No soccer balls ricocheting down the field. Five games canceled. No booming aces. The Western & Southern Open tennis tournament halted for a day.This is what the silence said: No more Jacob Blakes. No more George Floyds. No more Breonna Taylors. No more Natasha McKennas. No more Philando Castiles. No more Michael Browns. No more Tamir Rices. No more Eric Garners. No more Alton Sterlings.No more pain.Never before has the world of sports spoken so emphatically. The timing was unmistakably significant. The athlete walkouts were set starkly against a frightened Trumpian vision presented at the Republican National Convention.We watched this week as two Americas clashed in front of us, separated by generations and by oceans-apart views of race, justice and what it means to be a patriot.No longer was sports offering gentrified protest, with league-endorsed slogans on basketball jerseys. Calm collapsed in the face of the inevitably growing power of players to make more than a statement. They took action. It shattered the bubble of normalcy that had settled upon the N.B.A. and its fans, who watched happily from home as a pandemic and protests raged.“We are scared as Black people in America,” LeBron James said, downcast as he spoke at a news conference inside the N.B.A.’s so-called bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. “Because you don’t know, you have no idea, how that cop that day left the house,” he added. “You don’t know if he woke up on a good side of the bed, if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. … Or maybe he just left the house saying, ‘Today is going to be the end for one of these Black people.’ That is what it feels like.”Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics spoke with equally raw emotion: “Are we not human beings? Is Jacob Blake not a human being? He deserved to be treated like a human being and did not deserve to be shot.”Sterling Brown, the Milwaukee forward who in 2018 was tackled by police officers and shocked with a Taser gun after a parking violation, read a statement for his team that concluded, “Despite the overwhelming plea for change there has been no action, so our focus today cannot be on basketball.”Jaylen Brown is 23. Sterling Brown is 25. LeBron James, one of the older players in the league, is only 35. All three, like so many of their N.B.A. compatriots, are part of an emboldened generation of Black athletes, a vanguard challenging America’s norms in numbers never seen before.At the very same time, the Republican National Convention represented and embraced an entirely different vision — one nostalgic for the past, wary of change and angry for an entirely different reason. Sports personalities from an era when player protests were rarer figured prominently. Lou Holtz, the renowned 83-year-old college football coach who last led a team 16 years ago, proclaimed steadfast devotion to President Trump and spoke triumphantly of a mythical America where anyone can succeed by just working hard enough.Herschel Walker and Jack Brewer, both Black former N.F.L. players out of the league for well over a decade, struck the same tone, hailing Trump as a heaven-sent crusader against racism and a proponent of social justice, ignoring a reality that says the opposite.Two visions. Two Americas.2020 vs. years gone by.The N.B.A. is hardly alone. Walkouts rippled this week through the W.N.B.A., and through predominantly white sports like professional tennis and soccer. Games were postponed because of protesting players in conservative, tradition-bound Major League Baseball. At first the National Hockey League continued with its playoff schedule, before bending to pressure and taking a pause.This was the logical next step in the fervent activism inspired this year by the killing of George Floyd. As the nation grappled with 401 years of racial trauma, it searched for ways to break apart systemic injustice and violence against Black Americans.Players as prominent as Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets declared that holding a season now, resuming amid the pandemic, was a mistake and a distraction — and called for athletes to stay home and work within their communities for change.But the N.B.A. and the W.N.B.A got back to work. The players chose to use nationally televised games as a platform for their grievances. They draped their courts and jerseys with slogans and calls for change. They knelt during the national anthem.Yet those protests had lost their power. Slogans and refusing to stand for the anthem seemed less edgy when everyone — even corporate sponsors and team owners — glommed onto the movement like a fad.Indeed, violence against Black people escalated. And that brought on this week’s refusal by the N.B.A. and others to play sports. It was a swift jolt to leagues, owners and networks that live off televised broadcast games.Sports have long been a platform capable of providing shocks to the status quo. More than 50 years ago, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.Muhammad Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam War. Billie Jean King, the W.N.B.A. star Maya Moore and a long line of female athletes fought for justice and equal pay. And, of course, four years ago this week, Colin Kaepernick was spotted for the first time in his protest of police brutality, refusing to stand during the national anthem.The current refusal to play, however, is not simply a shock. This is an earthquake. Walkouts like this have never happened before in pro sports. Though this appears to be a temporary work stoppage — N.B.A. players have voted to return, probably this weekend, and other sports seemed to be following suit — a new high bar of protest has been established.Black athletes and their allies will not hesitate to effectively strike again. Next time, the stoppage may well last longer than a few days. Maybe players will sit out an entire season. Maybe they will be from the N.F.L. Maybe Black college football players and their teammates at schools like Alabama, Florida and Oklahoma will walk.Perhaps the other America will stiffen in tried-and-true backlash and persist in harkening to days of old.But the silence will speak to us all.Kurt Streeter is the new Sports of The Times columnist. He has been a sports feature writer at The Times since 2017 and previously worked at ESPN and The Los Angeles Times. See his work here. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — George Hill is hardly the biggest star in professional basketball. But he was the one who took the lead when a handful of players on the Milwaukee Bucks began talking about the police shooting of Jacob Blake a few days earlier in Wisconsin.The players, led by Hill, implored their teammates not to play in their playoff game on Wednesday, believing they had a responsibility to make a statement about the how the police treat Black people.What they envisioned — a one game, on-the-fly protest — instead inspired one of the broadest political statements across sports leagues that the United States had ever seen: walkouts involving hundreds of athletes in professional men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and soccer, as well as one of the world’s biggest tennis stars.LeBron James, basketball’s most famous athlete, said on Twitter that change “happens with action and needs to happen NOW!” President Trump, who had previously attacked the league and had publicly sparred with James, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, said people were “a little tired of the N.B.A.”By Thursday afternoon, the N.B.A. players had pledged to return to play, according to three people who were part of the discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity because final details of a comeback had not been worked out.“We are hopeful to resume games either Friday or Saturday,” a league spokesman, Mike Bass, said in a statement.But the players’ message was still echoing — within and well beyond the world of sports, perhaps to greater effect than ever before.More baseball, hockey and basketball games were called off on Thursday, along with football practices and other events as athletes urged greater focus on conversations about racism and police brutality.Basketball players, especially women, have been at the forefront of discussions and demonstrations about social injustice for years. That has morphed amid the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the shooting of Blake, a Black man who was shot in the back multiple times by the police in Kenosha, Wis., as he tried to enter his vehicle.Following their walkout, Bucks players, led by Hill and his teammate Sterling Brown, called for elected officials in Wisconsin to take concrete steps to hold the police officers accountable for how they treated Blake.“For this to occur, it’s imperative for the Wisconsin state Legislature to reconvene after months of inaction and take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform,” Hill said.The walkouts drew the attention of several prominent political figures. Among the first to weigh in was former President Barack Obama, who has personal relationships with several N.B.A. players. He praised the Bucks in a tweet on Wednesday “for standing up for what they believe in.”The reaction from the White House was much more critical.Along with Trump’s comments, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and one of his senior advisers, said on CNBC, “I think that the N.B.A. players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they’re able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially.”The players’ action, as impactful as it has been, has also come with some of its own challenges. At a private players’ meeting hours after the walkout, some players expressed frustration with the Bucks for surprising the union, their opponents and the league with their protest, according to two people who attended the meeting but were not authorized to discuss the details publicly.Then, after the protest spread and inspired some players to reconsider playing at all this season, the Bucks quickly backed resuming play, rankling some rival players, including James, according to the people.Several N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. players have increased their social justice efforts in recent months. James and other top athletes formed More Than a Vote to protect voting rights and reach out to Black voters. Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors guard, appeared in a video at the Democratic National Convention in support of Joseph R. Biden Jr., the party’s presidential nominee. Renee Montgomery, who plays for the W.N.B.A.’s Atlanta Dream, skipped the season altogether to focus on social justice efforts.Recently, the entire Atlanta team and others in the league publicly endorsed an opponent of Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican from Georgia who is a co-owner of the Dream, because she criticized the Black Lives Matter movement and the W.N.B.A. players’ social activism.Earlier this month, the N.B.A.’s owners, many of them billionaires, said they would donate $300 million over 10 years — roughly $1 million per year for every team — to a fund “dedicated to creating greater economic empowerment in the Black community,” according to a news release. In a Thursday afternoon video conference, N.B.A. players — the Lakers’ James among them — asked for an greater commitment from the owners, with the Charlotte Hornets’ owner Michael Jordan joining the call as much as an advocate for the players as an ownership peer.Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the Houston Rockets, said on CNBC that he did not think that the stoppage was directed at the league’s owners.“I think they just needed a pause,” Fertitta said Thursday. “They’ve been playing every other day. These are our partners, OK? We’re 50-50 partners. And if we do well, they do well. And if the league doesn’t do well, none of us do well. And they realize that.”With basketball games called off on Thursday, the prior day’s insurgency led professional and college teams in other sports to hurriedly scratch their plans, too.In baseball, at least seven games were postponed. The Mets and Marlins stood on the field at game time for 42 seconds of silence; 42 was the number worn by Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. The players then retreated to their clubhouses, leaving behind a “Black Lives Matter” T-shirt over home plate.Ron Rivera, the coach of the professional football team in Washington, a franchise with a troubled history on race, said the day would be reserved for “reflection instead” of football. The New York Jets, the Indianapolis Colts and the Green Bay Packers were among the teams that also canceled practices.Troy Vincent, the N.F.L.’s head of football operations and the highest ranking Black person at the league office, spoke tearfully on ESPN Radio about his fears for his three sons and his support for the athletes who sat out games.“I’ve got a 22-year-old and a 20-year-old and a 15-year-old that I’m trying to prevent from being hunted, and their teachable moment and I’m trusting my Lord, trusting him,” Vincent said. “I’m just — I’m proud of what the guys and the women are doing.”Boston College, Kentucky and South Florida abandoned plans for football practices on Thursday, unsurprising moves toward the end of an unusually vibrant off-season of activism by college athletes.“What happened to Jacob Blake is history repeating itself,” Max Richardson, a linebacker at Boston College, wrote on Twitter. “These countless tragedies are reoccurring. There can be no more ignorance. Changes WILL come.”Playoff hockey games that were scheduled for Thursday and Friday were also postponed.It was not always clear how long the various teams and players would keep their sports activities on pause.Four baseball teams that had protested on Wednesday resumed play on Thursday, and Naomi Osaka, a Black woman who has won two Grand Slam titles, said she would play in the Western & Southern Open’s semifinals on Friday. Osaka had planned to quit the tournament because there were “more important matters at hand,” but she relented after tennis officials agreed to delay matches by a day.By the end of Thursday, some in sports said they were already turning to political action beyond demonstrations. Mike Krzyzewski, the men’s basketball coach at Duke, told a rally of athletes that his players would register to vote later in the day.“This thing can be won, and your generation is the generation that’s going to do it,” he said without endorsing any particular candidate. “I grew up a long time ago in the ’60s. I thought it was headed in the right direction. Damn, I was wrong. I want to be right.”Marc Stein reported from Lake Buena Vista, Sopan Deb from New York and Alan Blinder from Atlanta. Reporting was contributed by Ken Belson, Gillian R. Brassil, Christopher Clarey, Matthew Futterman, Shauntel Lowe, Ben Rothenberg and David Waldstein. More

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Athletes from the N.B.A., W.N.B.A., Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer took their boldest stand yet against systemic racism and police brutality, boycotting games on Wednesday in response to the police shooting of a Black man in Kenosha, Wis. The moves dramatically escalated a season of athletes demonstrating for social justice as some expressed doubts about continuing to play amid widespread social unrest.The wave of boycotts and postponements was sparked by Milwaukee Bucks players’ responding to the shooting of Jacob Blake by refusing to come out of their locker room on Wednesday afternoon for a playoff game against the Orlando Magic. Two more N.B.A. playoff games scheduled for Wednesday night were quickly postponed, inspiring players in other leagues to follow the Bucks’ lead and causing numerous professional basketball, baseball and soccer games to be called off because athletes would not participate.Players from the N.B.A. and the W.N.B.A. have long been at the forefront of protests against racism and police brutality — efforts that have broadened in recent months after the police killings of George Floyd, a Black man in Minnesota, and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman in Kentucky, and as the leagues took an extended hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic.Then on Sunday, the police in Kenosha, Wis., shot Blake, 29, in the back several times as he tried to get into his vehicle.The shooting prompted numerous N.B.A. players and coaches to express frustration and anger that the various measures they have been taking for weeks to support the Black Lives Matter movement, such as kneeling during the national anthem and wearing jerseys bearing social justice messages, were having little impact. Some also began to question, as the Nets’ star guard Kyrie Irving did in June before the 2019-20 season resumed, whether providing entertainment through basketball was actually diverting public attention away from the broader social justice movement.Fueled by that frustration, Milwaukee’s players stunned league officials by organizing Wednesday’s boycott, a walkout that had virtually no precedent in N.B.A. history.Milwaukee’s George Hill gave a glimpse of the Bucks’ mind-set on Monday when he openly questioned whether the league’s return had successfully amplified the players’ messaging.“We shouldn’t have even come to this damn place to be honest,” Hill said. “I think coming here just took all the focal points off what the issues are.”On Wednesday night, more than three hours after Milwaukee’s game against Orlando had been scheduled to start, Hill and his teammate Sterling Brown, read a team statement.“We are calling for justice for Jacob Blake and demand the officers be held accountable,” Hill said. “For this to occur, it’s imperative for the Wisconsin state Legislature to reconvene after months of inaction and take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.”A joint statement issued by the Bucks’ three main owners — Marc Lasry, Wes Edens and Jamie Dinan — expressed support for Milwaukee’s players. “We will continue to stand alongside them and demand accountability and change,” the team owners said.A meeting Wednesday night was open to players and coaches from the 13 teams still at Walt Disney World to determine next steps — in essence to decide how soon, or even if, the N.B.A. playoffs should resume.Players from the Boston Celtics and Toronto Raptors were already deep into discussions about boycotting the teams’ second-round series opener Thursday when the Bucks staged their boycott. A league spokesman, when asked about Thursday’s three scheduled games, said no determination had been made about the N.B.A.’s upcoming schedule.Also Wednesday, players for the W.N.B.A.’s Washington Mystics arrived for their game against the Atlanta Dream on Wednesday night wearing T-shirts that spelled out Jacob Blake’s name and appeared to have holes in the back to signify bullet holes. Some W.N.B.A. players, including Renee Montgomery of the Atlanta Dream, had already opted out of their seasons specifically to work toward social justice causes.In Major League Baseball, three games were called off because of the players: the Milwaukee Brewers hosting the Cincinnati Reds, the San Diego Padres playing the Seattle Mariners, and the San Francisco Giants-Los Angeles Dodgers game.Five matches in Major League Soccer were postponed Wednesday after players objected to playing, while a sixth match — Nashville at Orlando in front of a reduced-capacity crowd — went ahead, a sign of how the situation was still evolving.And several athletes opted individually to not play, including the tennis star Naomi Osaka, who said she would not play in a scheduled semifinal at the Western & Southern Open in New York, a tuneup for the United States Open that begins next week.“Before I am an athlete, I am a Black woman,” Osaka said on Twitter. “And as a Black woman I feel as though there are much more important matters at hand that need immediate attention, rather than watching me play tennis.The Brewers and Reds — in a league that has been typically slower than others to respond to social issues — chose not to play after meetings between players on both teams. The words “JUSTICE EQUALITY NOW” appeared on multiple scoreboards at Miller Park as some players spoke with one another on the field.“Our community and our nation is in such pain, tonight we wanted 100 percent of the focus to be on issues that are much more important than baseball,” said Brewers reliever Brent Suter, the team’s representative for the players’ union.In San Diego, Mariners players voted unanimously against playing and their Padres counterparts obliged. The Mariners have the most Black players of any team in M.L.B., a league that has seen the number of Black players dwindle to about 8 percent over the decades.“For me, and many of my teammates, the injustices, violence, death and systemic racism is deeply personal,” said Mariners outfielder Dee Gordon, one of 10 Black players on the team’s opening day roster.“Instead of watching us, we hope people will focus on the things more important than sports that are happening,” Gordon added in a post on Twitter.The N.B.A. has been operating out of Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., since July 7, when 22 of the league’s 30 teams began residing in the league’s so-called bubble, designed to prevent the infiltration of the coronavirus. The league had suspended its season March 11 because of the pandemic.Orlando’s players were already on the floor warming up for Wednesday’s scheduled 4 p.m. tipoff, but Bucks players refused to join them for Game 5 of the teams’ first-round playoff series. Orlando’s players ultimately decided to leave the floor with just under four minutes before the game once it became apparent that the game would not go ahead. The referees soon followed suit.Many other players spoke out on social media as the boycotts began, including the Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James.“We demand change,” James said on Twitter, writing in all caps. “Sick of it.”James Wagner, Andrew Das and Sopan Deb contributed reporting. More

Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein’s weekly N.B.A. newsletter here.LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The Portland Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard, one of the standout performers of the N.B.A. restart at Walt Disney World, will sit out Wednesday’s Game 5 against the Los Angeles Lakers because of a sprained right knee, an injury that could end his season.Portland must win on Wednesday to avoid elimination in the best-of-seven series after the Lakers responded to a Game 1 defeat by winning the next three games by a combined 51 points.The severity of Lillard’s injury, sustained Monday night in the third quarter of Portland’s 135-115 defeat, was confirmed Tuesday afternoon by a magnetic resonance imaging exam after a postgame M.R.I. proved inconclusive.Lillard averaged 37.6 points in Portland’s eight seeding games before the playoffs to earn honors as the player of the seeding games by a unanimous vote of media members. (The New York Times did not participate in voting.) Led by Lillard’s scoring outbursts, which included games of 61 and 51 points, Portland nabbed the No. 8 seed and bumped the Memphis Grizzlies down to ninth, forcing the first-ever playoff play-in. The Blazers then claimed the last playoff spot in the West with a 126-122 victory over Memphis on Aug. 15.Lillard scored 34 points in the Blazers’ Game 1 victory over the top-seeded Lakers, but he dislocated the index finger on his left (non-shooting) hand in Game 2, then injured his knee on an awkward landing in Game 4 on Monday. Lillard finished with just 11 points that night in more than 26 minutes as the Lakers, who scored the game’s first 15 points, cruised to a 20-point rout.The N.B.A. restart began July 30 after a layoff of more than four months, followed by just three weeks of full-speed practices and scrimmages. This caused many teams to fear that players were facing an increased risk for soft-tissue injuries — a fear that is proving increasingly prophetic.All eight first-round matchups have been affected by injuries that high-profile players sustained in the bubble.Other prominent players who either sustained season-ending injuries in Florida or were still trying to recover from recent injuries: Philadelphia’s Ben Simmons (knee), Indiana’s Domantas Sabonis (foot), Boston’s Gordon Hayward (ankle), Houston’s Russell Westbrook (quad strain), Dallas’ Kristaps Porzingis (knee), Toronto’s Kyle Lowry (ankle) and the Los Angeles Clippers’ Patrick Beverley (calf). More