The Celtics' Jaylen Brown told fellow NBA stars they should only leave the bubble if they plan to take to the 'streets' and fight racial injustice, not just sit at home
- The Boston Celtics' Jaylen Brown reportedly told his fellow NBA players they should only leave the Orlando bubble if they intend to take to the streets and fight against racial inequality.
- The NBA season is under threat of being cancelled after Wednesday night's playoff games were postponed in protest to Sunday's police shooting of Jacob Blake.
- "OK, if you guys leave here, are you just gonna leave and go chill and hang out with your families and lose that loneliness?" Brown reportedly said during a meeting between players and officials, according to ESPN's Marc Spears.
- "Or are you going to be in the trenches? Are you going to be in the streets?"
Boston Celtics guard Jaylen Brown reportedly told his fellow NBA players they should only leave the Orlando bubble if they intend to take to the streets and fight against racial inequality.
The NBA playoffs are in danger of being cancelled after all of Wednesday's games were postponed after players from the Milwaukee Bucks, Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City Thunder, Los Angeles Lakers, and Portland Trail Blazers chose not to play to in protest of police brutality.
On Thursday, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Clippers were reported to have voted to end the season early following an "ugly" meeting.
The boycott has come in response to Sunday's police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man who was shot in front of his three children in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake, 29, survived, but is now paralyzed from the waist down.
"OK, if you guys leave here, are you just gonna leave and go chill and hang out with your families and lose that loneliness?" Brown reportedly asked players who were considering leaving the bubble on Thursday, according to ESPN's Marc Spears.
"Or are you going to be in the trenches? Are you going to be in the streets?"
Brown himself has already taken to the streets to support the Black Lives Matter movement. In June, the 23-year-old drove from Boston to Atalanta, Georgia, to lead peaceful protests on the city's streets, according to ESPN.
The Celtics star, who is a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, has also addressed the shooting of Blake separately, saying the incident has "traumatized" him.
"Most people of color, most minorities have a history with police," he told NBC Sport on Tuesday.
"The question that I would like to ask is: Does America think that Black people or people of color are uncivilized, savages, or naturally unjust, or are we products of the environments that we participate in? That's the question I would like to ask America, and America has proven its answer over and over and over again.
"Are we not human beings? Is Jacob Blake not a human being? I don't care if he did something 10 years ago, 10 days ago, or 10 minutes ago. If he served his sentence and he was released back into society, he still deserves to be treated like a human and does not deserve to be shot in the back seven times with the intent to kill. His kids will never unsee that. His family will never unsee that.
"And, frankly, I will never unsee it. People post my jersey all the time — No. 7, and every time I look at my jersey now, what I see is a Black man getting shot seven times. All America sees is his background, or his background before. It's easier to see that than it is to see the truth."
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