In June 2022, the same day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, released a statement along with WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert.
Silver and Engelbert said the leagues believe “that women should make their own decisions about their health and their future, and we believe that freedom should be protected.”
Less than a year later, one of the NBA teams, the Orlando Magic — as an organization — wrote a $50,000 check to Never Back Down, a super PAC promoting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, this week’s financial disclosures. Magic is owned by the DeVos family, prominent conservatives. Betsy DeVos, the daughter-in-law of former Magic chairman Richard DeVos, who died in 2018, was former president Donald J. Trump’s secretary of education.
The check was written on May 19, according to a team spokesman. That was weeks after DeSantis signed one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws, banning the termination of pregnancies after six weeks, but days before he officially declared he would run for the Republican presidential nomination .
The donation was “given as a Florida business in support of a Florida governor for the continued prosperity of Central Florida,” the team said in a statement.
The Magic’s donation to DeSantis, who is in his second term as governor, is not the first time an NBA team has put its name to a political donation. In the 1990s, the Phoenix Suns, then owned by Jerry Colangelo, donated tens of thousands to the Republican National Committee. But Magic’s check appears to be the first direct donation from an NBA team to a group directly allied with a presidential candidate — or one, like DeSantis, who is widely expected to run.
The donation is also a reminder that for all the NBA’s profession of support for the progressive causes its players believe in, several billionaire team owners — whose interests Silver represents — have committed their own power to fight those very goals. League spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement, “Team governors make their own decisions on the political contributions they make and we respect the right of members of the NBA family to express their opinions. political views.”
Owners like it Dan Gilbert (Cleveland Cavaliers), Tilman Fertitta (Houston Rockets) James Dolan (Knicks) and the DeVos family Donated large sums to Republican politicians who oppose abortion rights, gun control, voting rights and police reform — all issues supported by the NBA, either in public statements or through its Social Justice coalition.
“Anytime I’ve noticed in my research where the NBA has responded to player activism and player demands, they’ve always been forced to do so,” Theresa Runstedtler, a history professor at American University and the author of “Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA,” said in an interview.
He continued: “It’s always been a matter of the more vocal and militant players in the league pushing them.”
In the summer of 2020, several NBA players protested the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by police in Minneapolis, and the Milwaukee Bucks refused to come out for a playoff game against the Orlando Magic after the shooting at another Black man, Jacob Blake, by police in Kenosha, Wis. In response, NBA owners agreed to form the Social Justice Coalition, which would emphasize voting rights, police reform and criminal justice reform — all areas that have disproportionately affected Blacks. .
On paper, the NBA goes beyond traditional philanthropy. The Bucks’ walkout pushed the league to shape public policy, a goal that goes beyond what other professional sports leagues have pursued.
“Our goal is really simple,” James Cadogan, the coalition’s executive director, said in a social media clip introducing the group. “We want to take moments of protest, moments of people power like we saw last year, and turn them into public policy. We want to change laws.”
In recent years, the NBA has spearheaded Clean Slate initiatives, an effort among states to seal certain inmate records. A few weeks ago, DeSantis vetoed a Republican-backed bill in Florida about expungement of criminal records.
The Social Justice Coalition has endorsed several bills in its early existence, albeit with limited success: The EQUAL Act, a measure to end disparities in sentencing in cases involving the sale of crack and powder cocaine, is not yet federal law. The George Floyd Justice In Policing Act, a police reform proposal that passed the House in 2021, faltered in the Senate.
After the 2020 election, Republicans made a significant push to tighten election rules at the state level, then Golden State star Stephen Curry made a video for coalition pleading with fans to connect with legislators to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Separately, the coalition supported a voting rights bill named after former congressman John Lewis. Both bills were blocked by a Senate Republican filibuster. The NBA did not call for the removal of the filibuster.
The NBA is hardly to blame when a hot-button bill fails to pass a divided Congress. But it’s harder for the league to effect change when some of its team owners make it their mission to pick people who oppose that change.
In late 2015, with Silver still relatively new to the job as commissioner, the league partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety on a gun safety advertising campaign. Stars like Curry and Carmelo Anthony have spoken personally about the effects of gun violence in commercials aired during Christmas Day games, where the NBA traditionally has a large national audience. The ads did not call for specific legislation, but partnering with a political figure like Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who founded Everytown, is an unusual move for an American sports league.
The following year, the NBA moved the All-Star game from North Carolina to protest a state law that critics said targeted lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. Silver’s pulling out of the game had consequences for the local economy and embarrassed the politicians that sports leagues usually want to eliminate.
The state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, criticized the NBA, saying the league, and other critics, “misrepresented our laws and defamed the people of North Carolina simply because the majority of People believe that boys and girls should use the bathrooms at school. , gender-neutral locker rooms and showers.”
Silver would later tell an audience that the law was “inconsistent with the league’s core values.” (A frequent donor to liberal politicians, he is open about his own political beliefs.)
Now, one franchise has written a big check to DeSantis, who has signed bills that critics say target LGBTQ communities — which goes against what Silver called the league’s “core values.” DeSantis also clashed with Disney — with which the NBA does business as a broadcast partner of ESPN. Disney is a sponsor of Magic, though Disney did not respond to a request for comment on whether that partnership would continue. And the league is choosing to stay quiet for now.
What the NBA should and should not campaign for is not an easy question. But since the league has taken a strong stand for transgender people in one instance and abortion rights in another, its silence is notable when a franchise owner, using the team’s name, supports a politician with opposing views.
The NBA is, ultimately, a business whose primary goal is to make money. If it is also really interested in standing up for some social issues, it will also need to stand up to its owners.
