Basketball Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson got into hot water last month, explaining why he hasn’t watched the league regularly since 2020. At the time, the league put slogans on the back of players’ uniforms to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
“They had things on their back like ‘Justice’ and a funny thing happened like, ‘Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.’ Some of my grandkids thought it was pretty funny to play up those names. I couldn’t watch that,” Jackson said on the Tetragrammaton podcast.
The NBA’s bubble in Orlando to finish the 2020 season came in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and at the same time as the shooting of Jacob Blake. Players refused to play following the shooting of Blake by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020.
