(NEW YORK) — The NBA has new plans for managing the spread of COVID-19 during this year’s basketball season.
A league memo obtained by ESPN outlines plans for players and some staffers to wear contract tracing sensors during team-organized activities with exception to games. The NBA will require Tier 1 and Tier 2 personnel (players, coaches and other specific staffers) to wear the Kinexon SafeZone device during team travel and local transport and during practices. The device will not record GPS location and will only activate when within 6 feet of another person wearing the device.
The league, which conceived the new precautionary strategy along with the players’ union and medical officials, began testing the new contact tracing measures Dec. 23. Officials expect to implement the plan in full on Jan. 7.
The NBA memo also states that players and staff who do not comply with the league’s sensor-wearing requirement will be subject to discipline. The memo does not include specific details about disciplinary action.
(NEW YORK) — History was made in the NBA on Wednesday night when Becky Hammon stepped in as head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, becoming the first woman to act as head coach during an NBA regular-season game.
Hammon, in her sixth season as an assistant coach with the Spurs, took over after Spurs’ head coach Gregg Popovich was ejected in the first half of the Spurs’ loss to the Los Angeles Lakers.
“Obviously, it’s a big deal,” Hammon said after the game, according to ESPN. “It’s a substantial moment.”
“I’ve been a part of this organization, I got traded here in 2007, so I’ve been in San Antonio and part of the Spurs and sports organization with the Stars and everything for 13 years,” she said. “So I have a lot of time invested, and they have a lot of time invested in me, in building me and getting me better.”
Hammon is a former WNBA star who retired in 2014 following a 16-year playing career, including eight seasons for the San Antonio Stars, according to her bio on the Spurs’ website.
She has been named one of the WNBA’s Top 15 players of all time and was inducted into the San Antonio Sports Hall of Fame in 2018, according to her bio.
Even though she made history, Hammon said it was “business as usual” for the team, adding the Spurs players are “used to hearing my voice in practice.”
“Becky played, and any player who knows the history of women’s basketball knows what she meant to the sport,” said Spurs guard DeMar DeRozan, according to ESPN. “You don’t think twice about it. She’s one of us. When she speaks, we are all ears.”
Added Spurs point guard Dejounte Murray, “The future is bright for her. I hope she sticks to it and doesn’t give up. One day it may happen, or it may not happen. Who knows? But she is definitely on the right road, and I think everyone here appreciates her. She is setting an example for every woman out there.”
Hammon also received praise from Lakers star LeBron James.
“She’s been putting in the work, and any time you put in the work you get rewarded with opportunities,” James said, according to ESPN. “Tonight was a case where she got to step in and show her work, show her talents and her love for the game, and obviously, what she did as a player, first of all, we all know that. So her mind was able to transfer to our league, and she’s been great ever since she got in.”
“It’s a beautiful thing just to hear her barking out calls, barking out sets, and she’s very passionate about the game, so congrats to her and congrats to the league,” he said. ABC News and ESPN are both owned by parent company Disney.
Phil Ellsworth / ESPN ImagesBy DEENA ZARU, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — More than a decade ago, Sundance, a member of the Muscogee tribe, led a successful effort to change the mascot of a high school from the Oberlin Indians to the Oberlin Phoenix. So when the Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians announced that they will change their name, it was a “big win” for him and members of the Native community. But is it only the “tip of the iceberg,” he said.
Sundance is the director of the Cleveland branch of the American Indian Movement, one of the organizations that has been urging national and local teams with indigenous names and mascots to change their names for more than 50 years.
“There are so, so many issues that we need to address as indigenous people that are certainly more important than the mascot issue, but it is the mascot issue, among others, that prohibits people from seeing indigenous people as people,” he told ABC News, adding that the Native American ethnicity is the only one that is widely used as a mascot across the country.
According to a FiveThirtyEight analysis, hundreds of schools across the country still use Native Americans as their team mascots — monikers widely seen as racist and dehumanizing to the Native American community.
“There are people who will downplay the importance of the issue and say, ‘Gosh, don’t you people have better things to worry about?’ Well, dehumanization is, I think, the very root of all the other issues that we face,” said Heather Whiteman Runs Him, a law professor and director of the Tribal Justice Clinic at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
For decades, advocates for Native American rights had been working relentlessly to convince the teams to change their names — from filing lawsuits to protests to applying pressure on teams and their sponsors.
But it was not until an immense movement swept the nation in the summer of 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd — an unarmed Black man from Minneapolis — that some of the most high profile teams relented.
After insisting in 2013 that a name change will “never” happen, Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, announced in July that the team would change its name to the Washington Football Team, after FedEx, which has naming rights to the stadium, requested a change.
“Advocates within tribal nations in our communities started working strategically to target the financial backing of the sports — the Nikes of the world, the FedExes,” Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, told ABC News. “That was part of our strategic thinking, knowing that you’re trying to get something that is based on pure morality and a sense of justice is simply not enough — that the power of the almighty dollar and money in this country, whether you’re in sports, or a member of Congress, is such a powerful influence.”
Before deciding to change their name — a change that is expected to take place in 2021 — the Cleveland Indians stopped using the Chief Wahoo logo on their uniforms in 2019.
According to Sharp, who leads the country’s oldest and largest American Indian and Alaska Native tribal government organization, the widespread Black Lives Matter protests ushered in a national debate about race and racism in America — one that finally included the rights of Native Americans.
“We’ve known that a day of reckoning would come … the momentum has just been an incredible sacred moment,” Sharp said, adding that the organization has brought Indian Country together to advocate for the rights of indigenous people and “to be an ally and partner with others that are disenfranchised.”
The shift in energy comes amid some wins in representation for the Native American community that advocates are hoping will lead to policy changes.
Six Native Americans were elected to serve in the next Congress, a record in U.S. history. Meanwhile, Rep. Deb Haaland, who was nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to lead the Department of the Interior, could become the first Native American to serve in a presidential Cabinet. If confirmed by the Senate, Haaland would be the first Native person to oversee an agency that played a major role historically in the forced relocation and oppression of indigenous people.
For Whiteman Runs Him, “there’s a tremendous capacity for hope in this moment,” but she remains “cautiously optimistic.”
“Knowing history, we also have to be vigilant that there’s enough done,” she said, adding that the success of leaders such as Haaland will also depend on the support they get from other branches of government, especially Congress.
Sundance echoed the sentiment, saying, “What we need are people who will maintain their Native identity in the face of rules and regulations that have been enacted to keep us oppressed.”
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Wednesday’s sports events:
NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION Boston 126, Memphis 107 Brooklyn 145, Atlanta 141 Miami 119, Milwaukee 108 LA Lakers 121, San Antonio 107 Charlotte 118, Dallas 99 LA Clippers 128, Portland 105 TOP-25 COLLEGE FOOTBALL Oklahoma 55, Florida 20 Iowa at Missouri (Canceled) TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL Baylor 105, Alcorn St. 76 Tennessee 73, Missouri 53 Virginia 66, Notre Dame 57 Ohio St. 90, Nebraska 54 St. John’s at Villanova (Postponed)
(NEW YORK) — Here are the scores from Tuesday’s sports events: NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
New York 95, Cleveland 86 Boston 116, Indiana 111 Chicago 115, Washington 107 Philadelphia 100, Toronto 93 Golden State 116, Detroit 106 Milwaukee 144, Miami 97 Orlando 118, Oklahoma City 107 Sacramento 125, Denver 115 LA Clippers 124, Minnesota 101 Phoenix 11, New Orleans 86 TOP-25 COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Oklahoma St. 37, Miami 34 Texas 55, Colorado 23 TOP-25 COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Gonzaga 112, Dixie State 67 Baylor 93, Cent. Arkansas 56 West Virginia 73, Northeastern 51 Iowa 87, Northwestern 72 Texas Tech 79, Incarnate Word 51 Rutgers 81, Purdue 76 Clemson 77, Florida St. 67 Virginia Tech 80, Miami 78 Tulsa 65, Houston 64 Texas A&M-CC at Texas (Canceled) Buffalo at West Virginia (Canceled) Pittsburgh at Duke (Postponed)
cmannphoto/iStockBy CARMEN COX, ABC News
