Hall of Fame basketball coach Phil Jackson found himself in 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 Black Lives Matter. movement
“They had things on the back like ‘Justice’ and a funny thing happened like, ‘Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked it down.’ Some of my grandkids thought it was pretty funny to reproduce those names . I couldn’t see that,” Jackson said on the Tetragrammaton podcast.
The NBA bubble in Orlando to end the 2020 season came after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and at the same time as the shooting of Jacob Blake. players he refused to play following the police officer-involved shooting of Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 23, 2020.
Jackson denounced the NBA’s foray into social and political issues.
“He was trying to cater to an audience or trying to bring a certain audience to the game … and they didn’t know he was turning other people off,” Jackson said. “People want to see sport as non-political. Politics is kept out of the game. It doesn’t have to be there.”
Now, Jackson has taken back his words. While appearing on Stacey King’s Gimme The Hot Sauce podcast, Jackson explained that he was speaking in a joking tone.
“I don’t think people are humored by the names on the back of players that were on the bubble,” Jackson said on the podcast. via Yahoo Sports. “Because if you apply them to defend and challenge and go to the hoop, and use those nicknames that were in the names, it looked funny. That’s just what I gave the kids. Visually, that’s kind of humorous. No had nothing against BLM [Black Lives Matter] or the cause behind it. The humorous nature of being completely woken up by the NBA was really like, it’s pretty hard to watch.”
Jackson hasn’t worked in the league since serving as the Knicks’ president from 2014 to ’17.
