The NBA Had It Coming

For the past several weeks, inside a largely empty arena at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, the NBA’s season-in-a-bubble unfolded with a sense of something resembling normalcy. The virtual projections of fans’ faces on jumbo video screens still felt kind of like a herky-jerky episode, and the piped-in crowd noise sounded like a hollow imitation of the real thing. But as teams jostled for playoff spots, and as the Portland Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard pulled off a series of epic performances to squeeze his team into the postseason, the sheer competitive nature of the games seemed to overshadow the roaring crises of the outside world. So much so that when President Donald Trump inevitably about players kneeling for the national anthem, barely anyone inside the bubble was willing to dignify it with much of a response.