Podcast: A conversation about player protests, boycotts and postponed playoff games
The NBA playoffs have been put on pause. Now, the question is: Will the playoffs restart or will the season be canceled?
With the Miami Heat still waiting to find out which team it’ll play in the second round, the Milwaukee Bucks boycotted Game 5 of their playoff series against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, on Sunday in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The unprecedented boycott of a postseason game set off a chain of events. The other two playoff games scheduled for Wednesday — Game 5 of the Oklahoma City Thunder-Houston Rockets series and Game 5 of the Los Angeles Lakers-Portland Trail Blazers series — were subsequently postponed and all three games will be rescheduled, the NBA said.
In this week’s episode of the Miami Herald’s Heat Check podcast, sports reporter David Wilson and Heat beat reporter Anthony Chiang are joined by Isaiah Smalls, who covers Black life in Miami, to discuss the players’ historic protest and what it might mean for the remainder of the NBA season.
Wilson and Chiang close the podcast with some basketball talk. They previewed the Heat’s potential second-round matchup against the Bucks and also took a look back at the the Heat’s first-round sweep of the Indiana Pacers.
