The NBA's vicious math

For the league, the only thing "bigger than basketball" continues to be its negligence to women.

(Content warning: Descriptions of assault, IPV)

What is the value of a woman, I asked, last June. It took the NBA less than a year to give us its answer — 10 games.

In a 3pm press release, on a Friday, hours after announcing Mark Cuban and the Mavs would be fined 750k for tanking, hours before its last two play-in games and a day before the first round of the playoffs started, the NBA said it had completed its investigation into Miles Bridges’ felony domestic violence charge. The news, meant to be immediately buried, was a sterilized reference to the violent assault that nearly killed Mychelle Johnson and a vague outline of the league’s own internal investigation.

Johnson, referred to reductively in the release only as “the mother of his children”, was diagnosed with a brain concussion, closed fracture of her nasal bone, rib contusion, multiple bruises and a strained neck muscle, the result of being choked by Bridges until she lost consciousness. These observations were recorded in her medical discharge form.

The framing of Johnson as supplemental to Bridges (not mother alone, but mother to his children) serves only as sympathetic to the NBA. She has no agency, no name, because the investigation was never for Johnson, nor is it for Bridges. Whatever we’re to believe went into “reviewing all available materials”, “interviewing numerous third-party witnesses” or consulting “with a group of domestic violence experts who provide the league with guidance in such cases”, is a corporate trust fall.

The 30-game suspension Bridges was delivered might as well be Adam Silver pretending to make 20 of those games disappear behind our ears like a quarter, a trick that, in essence, is just gaslighting and fast hands. There’s no math, no logic, Bridges wasn’t under contract when he was arrested and charged last June and hasn’t been offered a new contract by the Charlotte Hornets or any other team since. When Bridges sat out this past season it was as an unsigned free agent. To arbitrarily (until Silver explains, it’s arbitrary, and even then) pick 30 as the number of games for his suspension, then to say he’s already sat 20 of those “in recognition” of missing this season, did not come from any aspect of the league’s “investigation” (that word, it must be said, is doing a lot of work — we assume six to eight months when, with no public admission of timeline, it could’ve been two rushed days) because who even reasons like this? In numbers, by game, and retroactively? Surely not your unnamed, domestic violence experts.

To pick any number of games as equivalent to each act of violence Johnson suffered under the hands of Bridges is a fucked up exercise in of itself. What do we assign asphyxiation, lacerations, a concussion? Five games a piece? Does that number double or triple when those actions hover near-death? Or the ramifications for Johnson and Bridges’ two young children who witnessed the assault? What is the psychic weight, in games, for trauma? The child endangerment laws of California state two to six years per conviction per felony child endangerment case, of which Bridges had three. Is there a subtraction because Johnson’s stated she didn’t want Bridges to serve jail time? Do you knock off games because for some, she’s now culpable in the assault by virtue of appearing an imperfect victim?

The NBA had an opportunity to come down as cleanly as it could. Either suspend Bridges for a season that came into effect when and if he signed a new contract, or have him sit out whatever numbing number of games the league concluded was worthwhile of horrific violence, but in the same continuous season. By coming down ambiguous and bogus, the NBA squandered a pressing, critical and timely opportunity to be blunt in its response — now and going forward — to domestic violence. It’s vile. The hardest conclusion to draw from its decision isn’t now whether this is fair or correct, but whether this makes the league look more cowardly, or cruel.

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Rehabilitation is a word I’ve seen used by people defending Bridges. While I don’t doubt that some of them sincerely mean it, it does feel, in other instances, like the new “due process”. A phrase I’ve heard and seen so often used by men when hedging on the word of women in allegations of sexual assault and domestic violence. Like “due process”, rehabilitation has become a signal as much as a shrug. A way to communicate they don’t trust or value women to the same degree they do men, a dismissive hand wave in a word without having to cop to or say so explicitly.

Like “due process”, “rehabilitation” does the job of shrinking down the actual time it takes to do what the words describe into something said or typed and then never thought of again. It excuses nuance and omits understanding because the person using it as tidy evasion assumes definition as fact.

I often wonder when pressed how far, or even if, these people would extend either “rehabilitation” or “due process” to everyone involved. If their due process works the same for women as men, has caveats for repeat offenders, for a sliding scale in severity of violence (read: “bad but could be worse” to lethal, not accounting for how small the jump), for how known two people were to one another (read: on a scale of complete strangers to “none of my business”, not accounting for how the perfect victim is still portrayed in the collective public psyche as a woman, alone, minding her own business), for whether the woman ever retaliated, for athletes they love to watch win on TV (and now, maybe wager on). If their rehabilitation extends to any women and children involved, is softened or expedited by loss (monetary, recognition, image, perceived potential), recognizes that rehabilitation rarely has a fixed timeline, accounts for deviations and failure, where they place ultimate responsibility for bearing out of the process.

I believe in rehabilitation, but its implementation in pro sports or the NBA as something we’ve yet seen or can see while things currently stand as they do, that belief is akin to fantasy. To trust a multi-billion dollar business to put its own direct profits, or future profits via a new tenuous agreement with the NBPA, in jeopardy by taking a firm stand, drawing a hard line, is to trust a snake to stay on its own side of the bed. The way a snake will move to warmth, to what might prove a dormant meal, is the same way the NBA moves to money. We haven’t seen the NBA try rehabilitation because it doesn’t need to. When it ejects athletes for drugs it does so because that’s a black and white (it isn’t, but can be presented as such) offence. The American psyche is on the league’s side.

Where teams are better equipped to mete out a more individualized rehabilitation, they’ve thus far balked. Opting to stand in the shadow of the league or behind its own employees, franchise front offices have mirrored the NBA in even their basic ability or willingness to address in frank terms allegations and instances of sexual assault and domestic violence. There is no jump here, no bridge in the current framework, that gets us from willful avoidance to a place where franchises are taking responsibility for an athlete’s rehabilitation. The buck will be passed, ignored, put off because there’s no pressure or precedent of it needing to be another way. If neither league nor team are willing to go near the concept of rehabilitation, why is the word being thrown around like a lifeline for people like Miles Bridges, let alone as a material option?

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It’s one thing to call out the league, to be as critical as we can for as long as we can (a personal responsibility, I see in the reaction to the league’s statement on Bridges’ suspension, still felt most keenly by women) as fans and media, but the trickle-down effect into our broader culture is noxious and deadly as a chemical spill, leeching into everything from language to interpretation to tolerance. We like to say, often and with pride, that certain things are “bigger than basketball”. The reality is this very specific blind eye callousness and negligence to women, in its permeability and lasting impact, might be the only thing that actually is.

What is the value of a woman, and what does it signal the wider world when businesses with as global and far-reaching influence as the NBA tell us plainly in responses like this one, to quit asking?