The NBA’s brand will be tarnished if the 2017 All-Star Game remains in Charlotte

It was never a question of whether Adam Silver and the NBA were going to weigh in on the All-Star Game in Charlotte. As I’ve written elsewhere, the league has established itself as a progressive entity this season, an authority whose power stems in part from its benevolence. Whether this is a marketing ploy -- a counter to the generally grim climate that, Cam Newton aside, generally surrounds the NFL -- or a genuine conscience is almost beside the point. The NBA cares, or at least acts like it does, and many of us are more than willing to take that at face value.

Silver has acknowledged the situation with the HB2 legislation in North Carolina, but instead of taking a firm position or issuing any kind of ultimatum, he described it with the almost paradoxically fuzzy term: “problematic.” There’s been no official threat made to withdraw the game, even as companies like PayPal announced their own boycotts and Bruce Springsteen cancelled shows. Despite the NBA’s recent track record, Silver is carefully weighing his actions here. Until the NBA puts the onus on North Carolina to make HB2 go away, we’ll never know for sure how serious it is about its opposition to what is, in effect, anti-anti-discrimination legislation.

This isn’t a protest, it’s a negotiation, or at least it’s being framed that way. The desired outcome may be absolute -- there’s no such thing as half-repealing a law -- but if Silver still entertains any hopes of sticking around Charlotte, he isn’t going to leverage his nuclear option. If nothing else, it would poison the waters even if he did get his way, and the NBA certainly doesn’t want an All-Star Game that happens under a cloud of social unrest.

In treading lightly, Silver runs the risk of North Carolina lawmakers not taking his pressure seriously. The longer this drags on the less likely it becomes that the NBA will have the time, resources, or options to change course. What’s more, Silver is leaving open the possibility that North Carolina lawmakers won’t take him seriously. He could be perceived as bluffing or overplaying his hand.

The league’s reluctance to go this far has rankled some, who reasonably expect Silver to make the league’s pressure explicit sooner rather than later. The game is still 10 months out, which leaves Silver plenty of time to let the situation develop. Yet given the groundswell of opposition to HB2, the longer the league waits, the worse it looks and the more out of step it appears. The NBA is behaving like a corporate partner -- which it very much is -- and in the process, revealing the limits of its politics.

Why is Silver holding back? On a practical level, the commissioner would certainly rather not have to move the game. He’d like to see HB2 disappear, but apparently -- even given the timeline -- it would be a sizable hassle to relocate the All-Star Game. Silver has also made the perplexing, self-justifying observation that moving the game while keeping an NBA franchise in Charlotte would pose its own kind of quandary. The NBA hardly has as much to lose as Charlotte itself and nothing compared to LGBT people already affected by the law, but Silver’s behavior suggests that pragmatics alone require him to move gradually and keep things as civil as possible.

Here’s where Silver’s approach could backfire. If the NBA is in part adopting a conscience to cater to its Dem-leaning base (people who live near oceans, people who live in cities, people of color), then refusing to play hardball could reveal the thinness of this commitment. My knee-jerk reaction to Silver’s latest remarks was pride in the league, a sense of relief that sports could think like I think and not automatically reinforce a jock and locker room-based sensibility. But if everything is an exercise in branding these days, then certainly the NBA knows that gestures in the right direction can, in the short-term, count for nearly as much as taking definitive steps to create change.

The day-to-day perception of the league buys Silver time to play the waiting game, but this shouldn’t sit well with those of us who really value the idea of an NBA imbued with some kind of morality. Until Silver follows through on his mitigated tough talk, we’ll never know for sure just how far the NBA is willing to go. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect it to pursue socio-cultural justice above business considerations. It is, after all, a corporate body with money to make.

There’s also a difference between advocacy and action. Falling in line with increasingly mainstream political views is different than actually leading the way or putting yourself at risk. Granted, the NBA wouldn’t be the first company or major cultural figure to go at North Carolina. While it certainly has the most at stake and the most to lose, it also has the most to gain in terms of sheer credibility. But as the great Tom Scharpling once told me, “You can’t eat cred.”

There’s always going to be a limit to how much the NBA can express or even feel. And once again, sports fandom brings with it a constant compromise between what many of us would like to see in the world (and would like ourselves to be) and the forces that in fact control it. This is the very culture, not just the business of sports, but sports itself.

To put it in blatant consumer terms: We want to believe in there being an endless supply of league-led compassion and morality, but there’s only so much to go around. The league is content to satisfy this demand to the extent that it can, and to the extent that it’s there in the first place. We can say with some confidence that it’s often in the NBA’s best interest -- and no doubt comes as a relief to it -- when sports heroism organically trumps real-world considerations.

In the end, whatever happens with the All-Star Game may reaffirm the fact that we’ll only ever get so much from the powers that be and they will always have their own agenda. We might even be complicit in it. The question of whether or not we can live with this is for each of us to answer for ourselves.