On Sunday, four teams played in two Game 7s. The Milwaukee Bucks (LOL) and Boston Celtics were up first, followed by the Phoenix Suns and the Dallas Mavericks. What does this mean?
That a day after Black America was shaken to its core because we’ve now realized that a grocery store on “our side of town” has become the latest place where we can be killed just for existing, Black players from the Celtics, Bucks, Suns, and Mavericks had to play in a win-or-go-home game to advance to the conference finals, despite the feelings that all of us were experiencing. And yet, no one seemed to care or ask them about it. It was clear that basketball mattered, but not Black lives or the Black psyche so much.
And despite how well Jayson Tatum and Grant Williams played Sunday in Boston, or how Jalen Brunson and Spencer Dinwiddie stepped up on the road in Phoenix, just know that they did despite what happened to people that look like them on Saturday. Because when you’re a Black athlete in America, competing at the highest level as a form of entertainment to the rest of the world, all the while knowing that the majority of the people that cheer for you don’t think your life matters, may be the hardest part of the game that you work at that a reporter will never ask about.