Former NBA coach and executive Phil Jackson wants everyone to know that he didn't mean anything derogatory when he said in April that he stopped watching basketball after the 2020 season because of the slogans on players' jerseys .
Hall of Famer told “Stacy King's Gimme the Hot Sauce” podcast this week when he said that while he doesn't like seeing players with slogans like “justice” or “equal opportunity” on the back of their jerseys instead of their names, he only meant it in a humorous sense.
“I don't think people found the humor of the names behind the players in the bubble,” Jackson said, “because if you apply them to defending and challenging and going to the hoop, and you use those monikers on the names.” Well, there was a funny side to it. That's what I was bringing for the kids. Visually, it's kind of comical.
“I had nothing against the BLM [Black Lives Matter] Or the reason behind it. The humorous nature of being fully woken up by the NBA is quite hard to watch as it really was.
The NBA allowed players to write words and phrases on the back of their jerseys in support of the fight against systemic racism in the United States. This came after massive protests across the country in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, and Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman.
Jackson, 77, told “Tetragrammaton” Podcast with Rick Rubin He thought that the NBA was “trying to cater to an audience” with the move and believed that “it was driving other people away from the game”.
“People want to see sports as non-political,” he said Said, “Politics stays out of the game; it doesn't need to be.”
Jackson won 11 NBA titles as a coach with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles lakers, for which he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007. He also played in the NBA for 12 years and was the president of the New York Knicks. 2014-17.