Tuesday afternoon, after NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had finished his press conference announcing Donald Sterling’s lifetime ban, NBA Player’s Association Vice President Roger Mason released a statement saying that if Silver had been too lenient on Sterling, a plan (of sorts) was in place for all teams playing Tuesday night to boycott their respective games:
“I heard from our players and all of our players felt like boycotting the games tonight,” Mason said. “We’re talking about all NBA players. We’re talking about the playoff games tonight.”
“We didn’t hear from the league yet. We didn’t want to jump to conclusions,” Mason said. “But we were prepared in the event that this decision didn’t come down to move forward that way. We didn’t think this was just a Clippers issue so we didn’t want to put the pressure on Chris Paul and Blake Griffin and that team, we wanted to band behind our brothers to do the right thing and that would have been to communicate with the other teams in our league and let them know what we were going to do.”
Mason appeared pleased with Silver’s decision and remarks, but had a word of caution regarding the next step:
“We’re happy with the decision but we’re not content yet. We want immediate action. We want a timetable from the owners as far as when this vote is going to happen.”
On a team-by-team basis, we’re not sure how such a boycott would have gone down. But Marcus Thompson of the San Jose Mercury News shed light on what the Golden State Warriors planned to do:
The Warriors were going to go through pre-game warm-ups and take part in the national anthem and starting line-up introductions. They were going to take the floor for the jump ball, dapping up the Clippers players as is customary before games.
Then once the ball was in the air, they were just going to walk off. All 15 of them.
Stephen Curry, along with David Lee, Jermaine O’Neal and Draymond Green, hatched the idea, and considered getting the Clippers involved to make an even bigger statement:
“It would have been our only chance to make a statement in front of the biggest audience that we weren’t going to accept anything but the maximum punishment,” Curry said. “We would deal with the consequences later but we were not going to play.”
So, it appears the boycott was a real thing, and if Silver hadn’t knocked it out of the park earlier in the day, Tuesday night would have been one of the most bizarre events in NBA history.
