Last night, Charlotte Hornets guard Michael Carter-Williams and Washington Wizards guard Tim Frazier became the eighth and ninth players ejected in NBA games in the last three days. The ejections have stirred up the conversation of whether or not the trend of the in-game confrontations is messing up the image of the league.
Keep in mind that fighting is a part of all sports.
Every season, there are fights in NASCAR, NHL, MLB, NFL, and even in the WNBA. The truth is, in competitive atmospheres in a group of adults in the physical prime of their lives, adrenaline gets going and emotions are running high. Fighting is bound to happen in professional sports because quite frankly, that’s just the way it is.
So the growing concern over these few instances over the last few days in the NBA is a problem. In every sport previously mentioned, the fights might get highlighted the next day in the world of sporting news before fading away. Why is the criticism so intense for the NBA’s altercation the past few days? These are, after all, 30-second shoving matches for the most part.
Well, the NBA, by far, is the blackest major professional sports league in America. At least 75 percent of the players in the NBA are Black, according to a 2017 US News stat.
With Blackness comes a certain level of expectation, because the fear of being plagued with the “T-word.” For so many years, players, teams, and the NBA as a whole have been labeled as “thugs,” which probably isn’t the best product to pitch to advertisers. So former Commissioner David Stern enforced a dress code in 2005 so that when players were hurt, they would have to wear a blazer instead of an oversized jersey, a durag, and a fitted baseball cap.
“The players have been dressing in prison garb the last five or six years,” the then-Los Angeles Lakers head coach wrote about the dress code. All the stuff that goes on, it’s like gangsta, thuggery stuff.”
The league’s revenue increased by over $2B in the decade after the dress code was enforced, according to statista.com.
So when the report of a handful of Houston Rockets players trying to get in the Los Angeles Clippers locker room came out, the one player with cornrows and tattoos was immediately called the mortifying “T-word.”
https://twitter.com/bobbyding2345/status/953152916558372865
https://twitter.com/BonzaiBuBu/status/953155972444209152
https://twitter.com/BonzaiBuBu/status/953155972444209152
What happened to REAL basketball? Today’s nba is a joke and full of thugs
— Geoff Ludwig (@geoffludwig) January 18, 2018
The word is so terrifying that the league had to act immediately on the situation and suspend Green for two games before the outside complaints became too loud. Rockets wing player Trevor Ariza was also suspended for two games because unlike every other professional league, there are only so many incidents the NBA can allow before developing the image of a bunch of “thugs.”
