Phil Jackson Walks Back Comment About NBA’s ‘Politics’ in 2020 Bubble

Basketball Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson got into 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 the Black Lives Matter movement.

“They had things on their back like ‘Justice’ and a funny thing happened like, ‘Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.’ Some of my grandkids thought it was pretty funny to play up those names. I couldn’t watch that,” Jackson said on the Tetragrammaton podcast.

The NBA’s bubble in Orlando to finish the 2020 season came in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and at the same time as the shooting of Jacob Blake. Players refused to play following the shooting of Blake by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, 2020.

Jackson decried the NBA’s foray into social and political topics. 

“It was trying to cater to an audience or trying to bring a certain audience to the game … and they didn’t know it was turning other people off,” Jackson said. “People want to see sports as non-political. Politics stays out of the game. It doesn’t need to be there.”

Now, Jackson has walked back his words. While appearing on the Stacey King’s Gimme The Hot Sauce podcast, Jackson explained he was speaking in a joking tone.

“I don’t think people got the humor of the names are on the back of the players that were in the bubble,” Jackson said on the podcast, via Yahoo Sports. “Because if you apply them to defending and challenging and going to the hoop, and you use those monikers that were on the names, it had a funny aspect to it. That’s just what I was bringing up to the kids. Visually, this is kind of humorous. I had nothing against BLM [Black Lives Matter] or the cause that was behind it. The humorous nature of going completely woke by the NBA really was like, it’s pretty hard to watch.”

Jackson has not worked in the league since he served as president of the Knicks from 2014 to ’17.