Former NBA coach Phil Jackson has criticised the social justice gestures in the NBA amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
The retired NBA player has claimed he hasn’t watched a game since 2020 when teams in the playoffs were sent into the bubble; a secure location separate from the outside world to protect players during the Covid-19 pandemic. The teams stayed at Walt Disney World in Orlando from July until October 2020.
During this time, players and teams took part in activism as a result of the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake.
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In an interview with the iconic music producer Rick Rubin for his podcast, Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin, Jackson was asked if he’s been keeping up with the NBA since his retirement in 2011.
“No, I don’t,” he confirmed.
The former coach explained he stopped watching a lot of games after the NBA Bubble was created to let teams finish the 2019-2020 season, which he called ‘w**ky’.
"They went into the lockout year, and they did something that was kind of w**ky. They did a bubble down in Orlando, and all the teams that could qualify went down there, and stayed down there," he said.
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Jackson was apparently unhappy with the mixing of sports and politics.
He said: "And they had things on their backs like ‘Justice.’ I made a little funny thing like, 'Justice just went to the basket and Equal Opportunity just knocked him down.' ... So, my grandkids thought that was pretty funny to play up those names. So, I couldn't watch that."
Although Jackson doesn’t directly mention the Black Lives Matter movement, NBA players across the league wore slogans in support of it at the time.
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Teams were allowed to wear slogans on their jerseys instead of their surnames while others wore ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-shirts and were filmed taking the knee.
Jackson believes the league was ‘catering’ to a certain audience.
"They even had slogans on the floor, on the baseline," Jackson recalled while explaining what turned him off.
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“It was catering. It was trying to cater to an audience, or trying to bring a certain audience into play. And they didn’t know it was turning other people off. People want to see sports as non-political.
"We’ve had a lot of different type of players that have gone on to be. Bill Bradley was a senator, a number of baseball players have been representatives and senators. But their politics stay out of the game. It doesn’t need to be there."
Jackson once coached the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers and is also a former professional basketball player, having played 12 seasons in the NBA and winning the NBA championships twice with the New York Knicks.
Gregory Robinson