New Bobcast: Viral activist Yusuf Abdul-Qadir, NBA Protests & Celtics-Raptors
Content from two of the craziest weeks in basketball history.
Hey all. Happy September. The Earth, Wind and Fire track re-entered the top-200 on Spotify this week and I swear it wasn’t me.
I’ve been staying busy producing various podcast and segments at CLNS Media, including this week’s Dome Theory Sports & Culture. We’re pushing 100 episodes going back four years to summer, 2016, and as 2020’s concludes feeling like it never began tragedy struck the country again with the shooting of Jacob Blake and various other police controversies as the George Floyd protests enter their fourth month.
The NBA and WNBA nearly walked away from their seasons last week in protests of Kenosha, WI police shooting Blake in the back seven times. They hoped to pressure their organizations and league to do more, and re-started this week with securements of voting messaging before November and opening NBA facilities wherever possible.
Boston, MA later announced that it’s too late to open the TD Garden for voting due to a voting location setting deadline that passed in August. It’ll be interesting to see how many other states are able to transform their basketball arenas into polls, or if other obscure voting laws render that objective obsolete
Here’s this weeks’ Dome Theory, available on all platforms below.
This week we welcomed Yusuf Abdul-Qadir, who you likely saw in a viral video from Syracuse addressing Mayor Ben Walsh on the city’s police budget. Abdul-Qadir argued that the city’s police budget funnels even more tax money from the city, as income from Syracuse is both spent and taxed in other communities.
That, among other gripes with American policing, became the story of 2020 in the US alongside the COVID-19 pandemic. We expanded on the clip, discussed the impact of four months of protest and if it’s appropriate to look to celebrities and athletes in these moments as we often do.
Watch The Breakdown: Defending Champion Toronto Raptors in trouble
How’d it go so wrong, so fast for Toronto in this series? My new YouTube segment “Watch the Breakdown” covered the Celtics and Raptors, and how the Celtics dominated a Toronto team that won more games than them through games one and two. Raptors writer Sahal Abdi discussed what Toronto can do entering tonight’s Game 3.
Daniel Theis and the rising superpower in Boston
How luck, and role players exceeding expectations can combine to create unexpected powerhouses in basketball. We’re starting to see one form in Boston as the Celtics started 6-0 this postseason and moved to NBA Finals favorites in Vegas and according to 538 this week.
These aren’t bad 76ers and Raptors teams that Theis and his teammates have discarded for six straight games. The NBA is defined by its own form of the wealth gap. The 1% who the rest of the league struggles to hang with. The Celtics once sat on the border, just outside that group, looking up at powerhouses like the Cavaliers and Warriors. Now, through shrewd team-building and luck in the case of a Theis and Smart, they’ve joined them.