Going into Tuesday night’s game, the putrid and COVID ravaged Nets (31-35) who were missing all of their original, healthy starting five were 18.5 point underdogs to the juggernaut, Milwaukee Bucks (54-13). And, miraculously, behind 26 points from Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot and 19 more from Gary Temple, led the Nets to a 119-116 win of the title contenders.

This is a happy bright spot for what has been a pretty dull season and disastrous bubble. Now, there are a few caveats tot he win. None of Milwaukee’s starters including MVP favorite Giannis Antetokounmpo added 16 points in his 16 minutes and only played the first half. So, basically, this was a bench team beating another bench team but what is actually impressive was their beating of Vegas’s ineptitude in making this an 18.5 point spread when Milwaukee has nothing to play for having already clinched the first seed and would not roll out their best stuff against the current seventh seed Nets.

The names of the players the Nets were missing is too long to fit into a sentence, so here is an entire paragraph dedicated to that: Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, Spencer Dinwiddie, Caris Lavert, Joe Harris, Jarret Allen, Deandre Jordan, and apologies to anybody else that I forgot but that at least gives you a pretty good idea with what the Nets were–or weren’t–working with.

The Nets are likely to be stomped by whichever team that they end up playing, likely Milwaukee or Toronto, but this could have been the most depressing bubble/playoff run imaginable will now have an actual record connected to it. This year was always going to be a limbo year for the Nets with Kevon Durant waiting in the wings, but we now how a bad playoff run plus Kyrie Irving can make a team fall apart very quickly, and this might be the galvanizing force to keep the Nets together long enough to be contenders.

The backlash to the NBA restart’s message of social justice and racial equality has begun with Oklahoma state Rep. Sean Roberts threatening Oklahoma City Thunder players that if they kneel it could have negative tax implications for the team. “If the Oklahoma City Thunder leadership and players follow the current trend of the NBA by kneeling during the national anthem prior to Saturday’s game, perhaps we need to reexamine the significant tax benefits the State of Oklahoma granted the Oklahoma City Thunder organization when they came to Oklahoma. Through the Quality Jobs Act, the Thunder is still under contract to receive these tax breaks from our state until 2024,” Roberts said in the statement.

He went on to make some other wild allegations in the statement tying the BLM movement to Marxism. “By kneeling during the playing of the national anthem, the NBA and its players are showing disrespect to the American flag and all it stands for,” he said. “This anti-patriotic act makes clear the NBA’s support of the Black Lives Matter group and its goal of defunding our nation’s police, its ties to Marxism, and its efforts to destroy nuclear families.”

This is pretty abhorrent behavior from a public servant trying to strong-arm a bunch of basketball players out of their constitutional right to protest through extortion. It was clear that his threats did not do much to the Thunder players who all kneeled during the national anthem.

With the NBA restarting it’s season Thursday night for eight seeding games before they start the playoffs, every player and member of the coaching staff involved in the night’s festivities locked arms and kneeled during the national anthem.

This is part of a concerted effort that the NBA has made to bring light to issues of social justice and racial equality during the season restart. Along with this powerful show of solidarity in the kneeling, players’ warmups had the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ printed on them and on the top of the court. Players were allowed to replace their last names on their jerseys with phrases that promote issues that they are concerned about with examples like “Freedom,” “Equality,” and “Education Reform.”

What was also encouraging was the NBA foregoing its policy to penalize players for kneeling during the national anthem with Adam Silver supporting their rights to peacefully protest.

Although these were powerful statements, there was also some basketball played with two games between the Jazz and Pelicans and the Lakers and Clippers. Both games were nail-biters with the Jazz and Lakers winning by two points each. With the powerful messages about racial equality and the great games, re-opening night for the NBA couldn’t have gone much better.

During a Snapchat Q&A, Nuggets forward Michael Porter Jr. claimed that COVID-19 was a conspiracy meant to control the world’s population. “Personally, I think the coronavirus is being used obviously for a bigger agenda,” Porter, 22, said on Snapchat. “It’s being used for population control in just terms of being able to control the masses of people. I mean, because of the virus the whole world is being controlled. You’re required to wear masks. And who knows what will happen when this vaccine comes out? You might have to have the vaccine in order to travel. Like, that would be crazy.”

Porter Jr. was reportedly reprimanded by Nuggets exec Tim Connelly. Connelly did not release a statement about Porter Jr.’s comments or their conversation, but Nuggets head coach Mike Malone spoke to reporters on Wednesday and supported Porter Jr’s right to free speech. “Obviously, I’m not the thought police. I’m not going to tell any of our players what they can and can’t say. All I would say is just be sensitive to the current situation in our country and throughout the world in regards to coronavirus,” Malone said. “Michael Porter and any other player on our roster, they’re entitled to their opinions and ability to have free speech, and I will respect that as long as it doesn’t become a distraction. What Michael stated, being around our players this morning at breakfast and practice, has not become a distraction at all.”

There have been some bad looks coming out of the NBA bubble most notably perhaps the NBA player most prone to poor behavior, Dwight Howard, questioning why payers had to wear masks on campus and having been disciplined for not wearing one while around other people.

In the second quarter of the Houston Rocket’s restart scrimmage against the Boston Celtics, Rockets guard Eric Gordon landed awkwardly on his ankle when he rose up to make a pass and immediately went down in pain and had to be helped off the court putting no weight on his ankle.

This could not have come at a worse time for a team with already shaky depth like the Rockets. Houston, which is currently the sixth seed and currently set to play the Denver Nuggets in the first round and are tied, in terms of record, with the Oklahoma City Thunder for the fifth seed with the Thunder holding the tiebreaker and are three games ahead of the Dallas Mavericks in the loss column for the seventh seed.

The team estimates that Gordon will be out for two weeks which would likely be every one of the eight seeding games. While they had a chance to move up to fifth in the standings and play the Jazz instead of the Nuggets in the first round, my speculation is that the Rockets goal heading into the bubble is to avoid dropping to the seventh seed and getting a first-round matchup with the Clippers. The Rockets have torched the Nuggets this season and have had the Jazz’s number in the previous year with their ability to play Jazz star big man Rudy Gobert off the floor with their small-ball play. The only team that can easily match and outdo the Rockets in their small-ball play and lineups which they demonstrated by beating them 120-105 on March 5, a week before the season got shut down. While it is still unlikely that the Mavs will be able to make up the gap on the Rockets, this Gordon injury won’t help. Gordon has had a down offensive season, but he added an element of lineup flexibility and solid rotation depth that will hurt their chances to get a favorable matchup in the playoffs and if he is out for longer my hurt their long term chances to make a deep run.

It’s probably not the way he pictured it happening, but LeBron James and the Lakers’ mission for a title, James’ fourth, hasn’t slowed down. Back when the season shut down in March the Lakers were on a roll. They had the Milwaukee Bucks, the team with the league’s best record, and the Kawhi Leonard led Clippers who had had the Lakers number up until that point in the season.  James was even garnering more and more MVP buzz despite having no real statistical case over presumptive favorite Giannis Antetokounmpo the narrative, which drives an inordinate amount of MVP voting, was getting behind James with him averaging 30.0 points, 9.4 assists and 8.2 rebounds in the nine games after the All-Star Break. And honestly, I think if the league hadn’t shut down then LeBron may have been able to steal it away from Antetokounmpo who had suffered a knee injury in early March.

Despite this abrupt shunting of momentum, the Lakers may have been the team that benefited the most from this stop in action. With a four-month layoff, that basically equates to a full offseason, the scariest thing in the league is motivated and rested LeBron, who by all accounts was pushing hard for this restart. Another widely accepted rumor in league discussions is that the Lakers never really stopped practicing by getting access to empty gyms and, supposedly, practicing at a full-size replica of the Staples Center in a wealthy Los Angeles resident’s backyard – a rumor that was actually reiterated by Pelicans guard J.J. Redick who claimed to have worked out at there.

The Milwaukee Bucks were the presumptive favorites to win the championship with a 53-12 record and an otherworldly +11.2 point differential, with the Lakers and Clippers, considered contenders but not favorites. But now, with the four months off and the quick ramp-up time into the playoffs the Lakers hold a few clear advantages. For one, I must reiterate that LeBron is rested, but also, the Bucks are a very-good, deep team that have great chemistry but no world-beating star next to Giannis – apologies to Khris Middleton – while the Lakers rely less on team chemistry and more on their two-headed monster of James and Anthony Davis. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but expect the Lakers to coast during the eight seeding games, with the first-seed all but locked up, and to come out hard in the playoffs, knowing that LeBron is 35 and in year 17 of his career and this may be his last true chance at being the best player on a title team. The Lakers are serious contenders and with LeBron likely resting in a hyperbolic chamber and making a few Kobe Bryant-esque Germany trips, I wouldn’t bet against them.

In the newest of a series of stringent moves that the NBA has made in order to enforce social distancing in the NBA Orlando bubble, the league has installed movable timeout chairs so that the players can maintain distance from their coach while in the huddle and so the staff can easily clean them in between timeouts. During this bubble experiment, the NBA has taken extreme measures to ensure that the players and staff are socially distancing with rules such as no doubles during ping-pong games and giving each player a wristband that tells them if they are developing COVID like symptoms and beep when they come within six feet of another wristband.

Most of this has been detailed in a 113-page memo that the NBA sent out to all players and staff detailing health and safety protocols within the bubble. Although this may seem extreme and overly stringent it has yielded results considering that the NBA announced on Monday that for the first time in their round of testing zero of the 346 players in the bubble tested positive for COVID-19. Numbers that are down from the 16 positives during initial testing. And the two positives from the testing done upon arrival.

It certainly will be an odd experience watching the players and staff socially distance in an empty arena while playing a contact sport, but I believe that the hunger for sports is so extreme that many sports fans will force themselves to adjust quickly to the alien viewing experience to the one that we are so used to.

Displays of solidarity from the NBA for the Black Lives Matter Movement continue. When the league unveiled the courts that games will be played on during the Orlando restart, the words “Black Lives Matter” were printed near the top baseline.

This continues the theme that the NBA has been following during its entire restart that it will be using its platform to raise awareness about systematic racism and police brutality and show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement. Earlier this month the NBA also announced that they will have a set of phrases promoting racial equality that players can choose to have on their jerseys in place of their last names. It will be interesting to see what they do during the broadcast to raise awareness and also what the players will say on TV with most of them already making statements about racial injustice and police brutality during media sessions.

The NBA and NBAPA said on Monday that the last week of tests, starting July 13, have yielded zero positive tests of the 346 players tested. This is encouraging news since the first scrimmages of the NBA restart this Thursday and then the eight seeding games begin a week after. Initially, during the first round of testing done before 16 players tested positive including Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic and Houston Rockets guard Russell Westbrook. And that number was reduced to two positive cases after the players first arrived in Orlando and are now finally down to zero.

With this positive news, it seems like the NBA’s “bubble” experiment has been a success so far. There has been plenty of content coming out of the bubble especially regarding the living and food accommodations. But it appears that the imposed social distancing and player isolation has been successful.

There still may be hiccups along the way with the always looming possibility that a key player may test positive at an inopportune time for his team. But with these results that indication is that we will be seeing professional basketball played this week.

Over the course of Sunday and Monday, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban went after, as he put them, the “National Anthem Police” who have been criticizing the NBA for kneeling during the national anthem. This, along with other protests by NBA players when the season restarts next week, is expected since many players have stated that they have opted into the restart partly to use the platform to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The tweet storm started a battle with Dallas radio personality Mark Davis – not to be confused with the Raiders Owner – who tweeted at Cuban, “I am so ready to be in on this year’s #Mavericks home stretch: so much promise, so much personality. But the minute one player kneels during the anthem, I am OUT. Surely” To this Cuban curtly quote tweeted “Bye.” And then went on a series of tweets criticizing the “National Anthem Police” and eventually got into a war of tweets with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who criticized Cuban, and the NBA’s overall silence, about the injustice in Hong Kong after the Daryl Morey controversy that occurred late in 2019. 

Although a fair point by Cruz, I fail to see how the BLM movement and the injustices in Hong Kong contradict each other. At such a tense time in terms of racial justice in America, it would frankly be odd for a league that is predominately African-American not to use its platform to speak out about racial injustice. Some of this awareness-raising has already begun with many players and coaches spotted wearing apparel with “Black Lives Matter” printed on them, including, the Raptors putting it on their post-game press conference and the league just announcing that the logo will be on every court.

I doubt the NBA will miss these people’s viewership if they chose to abstain from watching games due to the flag protests. How do these critics expect the players to remain silent and not use their platform to speak out? And while the NBA clearly has been keeping silent on the Hong Kong protests because they want to maintain a good relationship with the Chinese government, I don’t see any of the people complaining about BLM protests championing the citizens of Hong Kong. With scrimmages later this week, and a full restart on July 30, I don’t expect confrontations between people on either side of national anthem protesting to go away.