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Clay Travis: NBA Players Embarrassed Themselves With Short-Lived Boycott

Clay Travis: “The NBA players realized they had overreacted and found a way towards the season beginning again… Frankly, I think the NBA embarrassed itself. I know there are a ton of people in sports media who will tell you the opposite, and tell you how heroic it was. They made a decision to not play basketball because of something that had nothing to do with basketball itself. All of these leagues are basically setting the precedent that if something happens that upsets us players, and has nothing to do with the world of sports at all, we’re not going to play. That’s not a good precedent to set… It alienates a lot of fans… The players didn’t alter anything. I know people on social media are saying ‘ITS SO BRAVE, I’M SO PROUD OF THEM!’ but what did they do? They just prolonged the amount of time they’re going to stay in the Bubble. Honestly, what they did to bring attention to the situation in Kenosha actually makes them look worse as the details about that incident have come out more and more. The big problem in American life today is that social media demands everybody to have instantaneous opinions about everything based upon a very limited amount of actual data. There was a 20-second video from Kenosha, Wisconsin that went viral, and we didn’t know anything that happened before and anything that happened after. Now we know the larger picture at least so far… People were like ‘why didn’t they try to do something that was less violent before they ended up shooting?’ Well, they did. They tried to taze the guy. One of LeBron James’ first comments was ‘why didn’t they taze him, why didn’t they tackle him?’ They did exactly that. The guy was resisting arrest and refused to listen to what police officers were telling him. Police had been called because one of the women who called police said this guy was behaving in a harassing manner. And now we know this guy had a fairly substantial criminal record, and there was an outstanding warrant for him. And oh, by the way, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, he also had a knife. So all of those factors matter, but we don’t get many facts on social media, it’s all emotions. Ultimately what has led to games getting cancelled is all emotional-based responses, it’s not factual-based responses… A lot of people have said ‘Well, the NBA should be getting involved in situations like these’. REALLY? Do you really want the NBA to be demanding a particular result from an independent police investigation? That’s a fundamental rejection of justice. Justice needs to be blind and it needs to be independent. The NBA players were trying to put their finger down on the scale of justice towards one side or the other. I don’t think an uniformed populist should be dictating whether criminal charges are brought in a case or not, and I think that’s pretty scary to think about." (Full segment above)

Listen to Clay Travis explain why he thought the NBA players ‘embarrassed’ themselves in their short-lived boycott of the NBA postseason, and why he believes it’s a pretty scary precedent that the players set that essentially states that they’re going to boycott games in the future when notable crimes around the country happen, with an endgame of the local justice system somehow abandoning due process and caving to the players' demands.

Check out the video above as Clay details why he thinks the NBA players made a highly emotional knee-jerk reaction the last 48 hours, and why it ultimately didn’t involve much common sense.

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