NEW YORK — It took 13 games for anyone to realize something was missing.
Mark Cuban decided the Dallas Mavericks would not play The Star-Spangled Banner at the team’s home games before the 2020-2021 season even started. They reportedly also told all the other NBA teams of their plan, with no objections.
Even though the decision was not announced publicly, or even internally throughout the Mavs organization, no one really took notice to the missing national anthem until after they had played one home preseason game and 12 regular-season home games. Mavs employees realized it on their own, eventually, according to The Athletic, which confirmed Cuban’s decision on Monday.
The Mavericks had a limited number of fans in attendance at their preseason game against the Timberwolves back in December. No song, no fuss.
The move seemed like it was coming anyway with Cuban’s rhetoric, particularly on Twitter in an exchange with a Dallas-area talk show host and Sen. Ted Cruz.
“The national anthem police in this country are out of control,” Cuban said. “If you want to complain, complain to your boss and ask why they don’t play the national anthem every day before you start work.”
Aside from the lack of attendance, there’s a reason it took so long for the non-playing of one song to go mostly under the radar. Because no one actually cares or needs The Star-Spangled Banner played before every single sporting event in the country. We all know what country we’re in. It’s not the Olympics, the World Cup or American sports teams playing a game overseas.
Unless an American team or sports figure is playing in international competition, or a team is doing some very specific tribute (like Memorial Day or Veterans Day), we don’t have to play the national anthem all the time before every event like a prayer before a meal.
Really, it’s unnecessary.
The NBA mandates players stand for the playing of the anthem, but when it’s not played, then what? It’s had no objections to the Mavericks until the team’s decision became a big talking point on Wednesday.
“Under the unique circumstances of this season, teams are permitted to run their pregame operations as they see fit,” the league told The Athletic in a statement.
The NBA followed that up with a statement Wednesday afternoon from NBA’s chief communications officer Mike Bass.
“With NBA teams now in the process of welcoming fans back into their arenas, all teams will play the national anthem in keeping with longstanding league policy.”
To which Cuban responded via the New York Times with a simple: “We are good with it.”
This, after league commissioner Adam Silver in December said the NBA wasn’t enforcing that old stand-for-the-anthem rule because of the current state of racial and civil unrest in the country, highlighted not just by players in his league, but every major professional sports league in the country. Protests that started last summer were sparked by the continued broadcasts of Black and Brown men, women and children being killed at the hands of white police officers and white supremacists without proper punishment. Players around the league joined and even led marches across the country calling for justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Jacob Blake and the countless other victims of police brutality and racism.
“I recognize that this is a very emotional issue on both sides of the equation in America right now, and I think it calls for real engagement rather than rule enforcement,” Silver said in that December press conference.
The point of kneeling during the playing of the anthem — popularized by since ostracized NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016 — was not only to peacefully protest racial injustice in the United States, but to say that the anthem doesn’t stand for all citizens when Black and Brown Americans are racially profiled, victimized and killed by the same officers of the law sworn to protect and serve them.
The Mavericks echoed as much on Tuesday when asked about not playing the song.
“The decision to not play Anthem before Mavs games isn’t because they don’t love (the) U.S.,” The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported, “but because many feel the anthem doesn’t represent them, and they want to continue discussion of how to represent people from all communities when honoring U.S. at game.”
The rest of the league has continued playing the anthem mostly via recordings pregame. The Mavericks, now being mandated by the league, will resume the playing of the anthem at home games starting with its game at the American Airlines Center against the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday.
Cuban’s initial decision regarding the song, however, more importantly has drawn attention back to what the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer tried to hit home.
