The accidental prescience of NBA All-Star's U.S. vs. World

Or, how the NBA unintentionally set a stage for this geopolitical moment.

What did Mark Tatum know? Is the joke I make in the days leading up to the World Economic Forum in Davos; the simultaneous ratcheting up of the Trump administration’s threats to take Greenland by force, by any means necessary.

While the NBA is more my reference point than most people, for most things, I caught myself. Funny, comforting, bizarre to be comforting, that NBA basketball had crossed just then into my political lexicon.

On one hand, when you live in a country that has been given the up-and-down by Trump’s roving eye, been treated to that particular brand of predatory gaze with childish impulses to match, you feel inclined to make jokes where sovereignty is concerned. Especially when that eye and ire seem to be settling back on you.

On the other — was there some truth to it?

Like the majority of major sports leagues, private entities all, the NBA does its utmost to perform in the mainstream and keep its politics in the margins. There was a brief and hopeful blip, in the summer of 2020, when both existed synchronously at centre stage, but it wouldn’t last (I count the NBA’s initial, swift response to the Covid pandemic — canceling games and in the process underscoring the virus’s severity for a huge swath of the public — as foremost human; Covid wasn’t politicised until later). Throughout the league’s history there have been a consistent handful of vocally progressive athletes and coaches (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Gregg Popovich, Steve Kerr), as well as generally outspoken figures (Kyrie Irving), but most are mum in public during their playing careers.

The NBA likes to keep itself aware of but outside of the moment. Close enough to meet the moment, to offer a statement when needed or if pressed, but removed enough that it won’t be responsible for keeping that kind of time. So, with the U.S. vs. World themed All-Star Game approaching, rearing up amidst the geopolitical rupture reworking post-war order foisted onto the world by the United States, the NBA is very much about to become the moment.

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What stood out to me most last All-Star Weekend, off the court, were the number of times friends assured me Trump was only bluffing with his annexation threats to Canada, and the Boston Dynamics robot dogs that walked Shaquille O’Neal onto Sunday night’s pre-game stage.

Later, when the game was over and most of the player pressers had wrapped, there was commotion in one of Chase Center’s tunnels-turned-staging areas. A crowd had gathered, phones held aloft. At first I couldn’t see what everyone was focused on, but then one of the robot dogs was escorted through by a handler working its controls. People cooed, took selfies. These are tools deployed in policing and surveillance but here they’d danced, tossed t-shirts into the crowd.

I’d been waiting for friends to file stories and finish working but wound up turning away and leaving right then. I felt unsettled, the usual suspension of normalcy needed to take in All-Star at face value passing quickly, darkly, into a reality beyond I wasn’t prepared for. I walked fast, weaving around players and their families, called a quick thanks to security and rushed into the night. The thin fog and heady smell of The Bay, a relief. I walked for a long time.

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The theme of this year’s All-Star Game is meant to highlight the prominence of international players in the NBA and, this is a guess, tap lightly into the overinflated panic that the future face of the league won’t be American. The NBA understands the discourse swirling around it and knows where to lean for ratings. In this case, heavy on talent and lightly on fear.

What the NBA knew about the geopolitical collision course it was on back in November when the format was announced was as much as the rest of us. In November, the U.S. had not yet kidnapped the sitting leader of a sovereign country, made threats of invasion by military force and financial coercion for the purpose of annexation against Greenland, toyed with destroying NATO, insulted NATO allies, or shot dead in escalating succession its own citizens in the streets. That doesn’t mean these actions weren’t already in motion. The unchecked cruelty, brashness, greed and god complex of this American administration has had its foot shoved down on the gas since day one, its expansionist impulse straining to run.

The league has its own global goals. Two regular season games were played in Europe earlier this month, one in Berlin and the other in London. The NBA has a satellite league in Africa with the BAL, and wants to launch its European offering by October 2027.

There’s big money involved — the NBA’s franchise fee for hopeful European teams is estimated to be between $500 million and $1 billion, with investment encouraged from private equity, deep-pocketed Middle Eastern investors, and sovereign wealth funds (the current cap for sovereign wealth fund investment in the NBA is 20%, but that won’t exist for European expansion). There are big names involved too, with the league looking to established European football clubs, like Manchester City and Real Madrid, as foundational members. Beyond what Adam Silver gets asked about NBA Europe’s progress at his annual All-Star Weekend presser, and the meetings and handshaking going on behind the scenes about it over the weekend in Los Angeles, there won't be an official tease. But then the name of the game, stiff, corporate-coded, under-the-radar innocuous as it is — leaving off ‘The’ from World as to make it less directive and ‘A’ from U.S. to make it less a rallying chant — is doing that already.

It would’ve been innocuous enough, watching Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic volleyball bump the basketball to each other down the floor in L.A. Or watch a hapless U.S. All-Star get tanged in Victor Wembanyama’s legs in one of what will be thousands of languid transition sequences. There already would’ve been the sense of otherness in the game — or in Wembanyama’s case, otherworldliness.

There have been star players from every continent in the league for decades; there have also been players turned stars by virtue of their outlier (not American) status. But all the ways the NBA is working to expand itself as a global entity are simultaneously working against the forceful, breakneck inversion of the country it calls home. U.S. vs. World becomes less a competitive but stakeless game than stark reality with every passing day.

The league could not have guessed at the slow creep of American ethnocentrism hitting its stride in state sanctioned enforcement via cruelty and violence right around the time the perception of other as novelty (“Linsanity”) was getting swapped for other as threat (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, weirdly) in the NBA. It’s why the prescience of this moment, this game, feels so uncharacteristically unplanned for the league. This is an entity, quite literally, founded on metrics; one that tends to map out every outcome and how each step toward that end will be interpreted. There are very few surprises by and from the NBA beyond what happens in its games. When the product is surprise, the mechanics supporting it need to stay steady.

The timing of the game, along with the palpability of this knife’s-edge domestic stand in the U.S. and widening geopolitical schism abroad, are such a specific kind of clusterfuck that I’m sure everyone involved at the league is routinely taking an extra beat in the bathroom to look in the mirror and mouth, What the fuck?

Finally, and darkly fitting, the setting of this game: Intuit Dome. The billion dollar crown jewel of one of the world’s richest men, where the battle against the American surveillance state was lost to convenience, a surrender that hinged on buying chicken tenders with your face. That, plus 1,400 toilets, is what the host franchise — and the United States, by virtue of the game’s framing — has on offer.

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The recurrent fight people have with the NBA when it comes to wanting it to be progressive and consistent in that progressiveness, wanting it to be good, is that the league so rarely says the direct thing in the right moment. Even in the Bubble, that bizarre and powerful apex of the NBA’s outward-facing activism, the message was muted: the “social messages” athletes wore on their jerseys, from a pre-approved list players were emailed, not wrong but watered down. Kneeling during the American anthem, withholding labour and thereby postponing games — those were athlete-led and spontaneous. They tapped into the immediacy of the moment and also the immediacy of its pain. The league, by contrast, moves slow because there are so many levels of comparison and approval.

It’d be one thing if the U.S. was only against the world, but the federal violence and fear-mongering its deploying against its own people feels like the sort of pent up rage Trump et al are not getting to express outright, at their perceived global enemies. As the situation escalates in Minneapolis — and I don’t want to be passive here, ICE is escalating the situation and has been all along — I wonder about state sanctioned brutality spilling over to those we typically assign as immune: anyone with money and status as means of a buffer, but in this case, athletes specifically.

It’s happened before. Sterling Brown was tasered in a CVS parking lot by Milwaukee police in 2018. He’d stopped to pick something up and parked his car slightly over the edge of another parking space in an otherwise empty lot. Eight cops showed up, surrounding Brown on his way out of the store. Afterward, one of the police involved posted jokes online about it, writing on Facebook, “Nice meeting Sterling Brown of the Milwaukee Bucks at work this morning! LOL #FeartheDeer” — and all this was before the Trump administration began lying about killing people and offering immunity to the cowards who murder them.

The Timberwolves were set to host the Warriors on Saturday evening, the day ICE shot ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti 10 times at point blank range, after wrestling him to the pavement and pistol whipping him. Pretti was helping to direct traffic in an area of Minneapolis clogged by ICE’s presence, and moved to help a woman up off the street after an ICE agent shoved her into a snowbank. His last words were, “Are you okay?” The game was postponed.

There are plenty of videos now, surely more to come. I hope that players on the Wolves roster watch at least one of them when it inevitably floats into one of their social feeds. I hope they watch it and feel an impulse to act, to abstain from playing their rescheduled game tonight.

Separation exists in our heads. For Wolves players, the sense of being outside the grim reality descended onto the city that they play for, the city that supports them, will not last. For the franchise and the league, it’s not enough to try and stay small and keep quiet in the hopes that they will go unnoticed by an administration motivated by its growing list of vendettas, and the singular wish to inflict maximum fear and suffering along the way.

Violence like this, the carelessness and blatancy of the people enacting it, doesn’t hold to strict lines. It spills over.

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What’s to be done with this momentum? I don’t know anyone in this space who isn’t aware of this very specific confluence, but still can’t quite bring themselves to interrogate the All-Star Game beyond its abstract. And isn’t that disjointed, slow-motion dread how the world feels right now, writ large? Knowing what is coming, recognising all the signs, ticking boxes as they assuredly come, and still feeling like there’s nothing to be done. Indecision fatigue.

I think, strangely often, about Adam Silver going into the All-Star locker rooms ahead of games past and asking players to commit, compete, to put on a show. The beat of silence and shuffling as everyone in the room switches from pre-game banter, a discordant excitement, into focus — familiar to me. There’s always a bit of a barometric social shift, entering that space from outside it. Especially when you are not as familiar, on the visiting end, as the majority who enter it.

Likewise I’ve been thinking a lot about courage. The undeterred quality of it being shown by regular people in Minneapolis, in the middle of winter against a plainly evil organisation with funding in the billions; the same pervasiveness and patterns in conflicts around the world. Not superhuman but very basic, informed and replenished by caring for the people and communities around them, a courage that makes despotic powers nervous for its simplicity and endless supply.

One could argue it’s courageous to try very hard and very openly to attempt to restore, or bring something back from the brink. Naked care, out in the open. One could make that argument for the All-Star Game, for all the iterations to improve it in the last few seasons. One could, I might, but not right now.

The thing about courage is that you don’t miraculously stumble on it. What happens is you begin to see clearly a threat for what it is. You look it in the eye, feel its press on your chest, its doubtful wriggle in your brain, the cool of its shadow cast upon the abstract composition of your livelihood, and walk toward it anyway.