Former National Basketball Association coach Phil Jackson, who garnered 11 championships between his years coaching the Lakers and the Bulls from 1989 through 2011, said in a recent interview that the NBA's political sloganeering is a form of "catering" and that "people want to see sports as non-political."
Jackson went on the Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin podcast on April 5 and, after being asked if he enjoyed watching the modern NBA matchups, he said, "I'm not enjoying the game."
Rubin asked if the coach had stopped watching upon his retirement and Jackson replied, "No, I didn't. I watched the game evolve and decided that they went into the lockout year and they did something that was kind of wonky. They did a bubble down in Orlando. And all the teams that could qualify went down there, stayed down there."
According to Fox News, the Orlando NBA Bubble was created so that the association could round out their 2019-2020 season in the midst of the Covid pandemic.
Speaking of the players that year, Jackson said,"And they had things on their back like 'justice' and I made a little funny thing like, you know, 'Justice just went to the basket and equal opportunity just knocked him down."
The coach added that his grandchildren thought his "play up" on the social justice slogans was funny.
"I couldn't watch that," Jackson said in reference to the social justice messages on the player's backs that year.
When asked if Jackson thought the sloganeering made the sport into a "sideshow," the coach answered, "They even had slogans on the floor, on the baseline."
"It was catering," Jackson said. "It was trying to cater to an audience or trying to bring a certain audience into play and they didn't know it was turning other people off, you know, people want to see sports as non-political."
"You know, we've had, we've had a lot of different types of players that have gone on to be like, you know, Bill Bradley was a senator, a number of baseball players have been representatives and senators and political, but their politics stay out of the game," Jackson added.
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