Q&A with NBPA executive director Michele Roberts

LOS ANGELES — It’s Sunday morning of All-Star Weekend. Between meetings and conferences just before brunch, Michele Roberts and I settle into a quiet space at the London Hotel in West Hollywood where the Players Association has assembled for the weekend.

It’s been a busy week for the executive director of the Players Association. On Friday, the NBPA announced the launch of THINK450, its licensing and marketing subsidiary. This has been a major initiative for Roberts ever since the players took control of their licensing rights in July.

I also spoke with Roberts days after Cavaliers star LeBron James was called out by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, who made the argument that James should not speak out publicly on social justice and equality and should “shut up and dribble.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

We’re in an interesting place in the league’s history. There’s labor peace, a strong television contract, and ratings are good. What’s important to you and the Players Association right now?

The top of the agenda right now is THINK450. We officially took back our group licensing rights last July, but we needed some runway to get staffed up, to examine the licensing agreements that continue to be in place and were negotiated by the league. To get some sense of what, if anything, we wanted to do to continue the relationships.

Now we’re about the business of rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. Frankly, do I lose sleep thinking we’re not going to be an absolute success? No. Do I lose sleep thinking we’re not going to be an absolute success? Yes. Because we must.

I’m confident in the team we’ve assembled and have in place. This is important. We’re taking over a $100 million-plus business. We want to grow it. We want the players to be proud of it, and we want the players to have no regrets that they agreed to do what every other sports union has done and take back our rights.

What can you do that isn’t being served in the marketplace?

Everybody knows that these men are fabulous athletes. Everyone knows that they are the best basketball players on the planet. What they don’t know, and what they want to know, is more about the men themselves.

It’s no coincidence that these guys have tens of millions of followers on social media. They want to know more about LeBron (James) as a dad. They love seeing him playing with his kids. They love watching him cheer his son at basketball games. They want to know what his wife is like. They want to know what they do off the court. I agree. I want to know too.

What we want to do is reintroduce the players as not simply players, but they are remarkably interesting and clever and funny and bright and progressive men. We want to feed that appetite.

Basketball players are incredibly stylish, just by the nature of their profession.

Trendsetters.

Trendsetters, right. You see players put a lot of effort into what they wear and it’s not just for fun. It’s expression.

I’m old enough to remember when a dress code was imposed by the league. I don’t know this because I wasn’t working in the sport at the time, but my recollection is there was some resistance by some of the players who didn’t want to be told what to do, especially what to wear.

What’s interesting is the new generations of players. At Fashion Week in New York, we’ve got a ton of guys out there. They’re listening, learning, showing, expressing, it’s really quite something. What they wear, our fans want to replicate. They are cultural icons.

You see writers, maybe from my generation, I’m 43.

Oh, you’re a child. [Laughs.]

You might see older writers roll their eyes at this kind of stuff, but people on our staff at SB Nation, who are younger, are very interested in it and take it seriously.

Social media allows us to have real-life evidence of the popularity of our guys. It’s not because of anything I say or you write that gets them following these men. They want to hear what they’re saying, what pictures they’re posting, songs they’re listening to, what clothing they’re wearing.

Those of us who are (ahem) up there in age may wonder why, but you can wonder why all day long. The reality is these men are cultural icons and people follow them and do it with interest every day.

I’ve watched LeBron’s evolution and growth, not just as a player but as a person over the years. His ability to handle a tense media situation is not something to be taken for granted. And he’s able to deal with it on a daily basis.

Oh, yes. That’s true.

LeBron’s influence on his peers, how far does that extend for the players?

I don’t think it’s unlike any other profession. When I was a young lawyer, naturally I wanted to see what trial lawyers were doing who were really good. I wanted to know more about them and they became my icons.

LeBron’s been in the game for over 10 years now, so a lot of these guys were really little when they first had a chance to see him play, and they are in awe of him. They are in awe of his game, and they are in awe of his ability to manage his life.

What does he have, 35 million followers on Twitter alone? I bet 449 of them are current NBA players. They respect him and they listen to him, and I think they are emboldened by his courage. He does not back down. These men admire the fact that he will take on the president of the United States, and not be afraid to do it.

When I have conversations with the guys, I ask them how they’re feeling about what’s going on in the world. They say, ‘We are important, we have a platform, and we shouldn’t be afraid to articulate our views.’ And they like that people respect them when they do.

I think he does inspire them. And I’m glad he does.

Let me bring up a different generation. I had time to talk with Jaylen Brown about meditation and mental fitness. People reached out and said, ‘My son loves Jaylen Brown, and he’s going to try this.’

That’s spectacular.

There’s a lot of attention being paid to wellness right now. It’s something that’s always been whispered about in the NBA.

I lied a little bit when I talked about licensing being top of mind. What we’re doing now [with wellness] and frankly, it was a huge gap in coverage. I’ll blame both the union as well as the league.

Everyone makes much ado about physical health and making sure these athletes are able to stay injury free so they can play. It’s been preposterous not to realize that mental wellness needed to be given attention.

There are very few professions that are as high anxiety as this. Can you imagine playing in a stadium in front of tens of thousands of people, being covered by journalists and media who will mock every single bad move that you make? Now with social media, you can’t even go have a drink or a cocktail without somebody. [Waves phone.]

I’m not apologizing for the fact that they are blessed to be able to live it, but it’s a tough, tough life.

We’ve been naive — I’m being kind when I say naive — in thinking that we didn’t have to address and make sure that we were giving as much attention to our players’ mental wellness, as we were their physical.

One of the things we negotiated in the most recent collective bargaining agreement was that the league, together with the union, would devote resources to a mental wellness program.

It’s in the early stages. We’ve made one hire. We’re in the process of hiring a director. I hoped that we’d have everything up and running by All-Star. Clearly we haven’t, but we want to make sure we get the right staff so that this is the success it needs to be.

We’re working on it, but it’s a shame that this hasn’t been given attention a long, long time ago.

Would this program run through the union, through teams? How will it work?

What we’re hoping to create is that it will be run by neither. It will be funded by both, but it will be completely independent and separated from teams, league, and PA. Frankly, it’s not just sports. There is a stigma attached to needing to get some help mentally.

We don’t want players to be discouraged from getting help when they need it because they’re concerned that it will get back to the team, or it may affect their play, or it may affect their next contract.

The league and the PA agreed that in order for this thing to work, it needed to be operating on its own. And that no one, absolutely no one, would have access to any information. Strict confidentiality to the extent that it can be protected.

So, we’ll see. It has to work and I’ve got to believe that we’re on the right track.

There’s a movement in terms of data collecting and wearable tech. For players it can be useful and beneficial, but there’s also a question of who’s collecting all this data and what are you using it for. What are your concerns?

The minute I got the job, I’ll confess that I didn’t have any history on wearables. My first question was, ‘Oh, isn’t this interesting, I wonder if it’s useful?’

But the real questions are: Who owns it, who has access to it, and how do we protect the players’ privacy? How do we make sure it’s not used against a player?

What we did during the course of collective bargaining was get the league to agree to first off, rein it in. Different teams were doing different things because they weren’t required to disclose anything to anybody. Because of this notion of so-called competitive advantage, they were able to keep it close to the vest.

So, we were able to agree that several things have to happen. Number one, we can not compel a player to wear any wearable device for any reason whatsoever. And it can only be used in practice. It can not be used during the game. And the information has to remain with the team. It can’t be disclosed if a player is traded. The typical HIPAA requirements had to be in place.

It is absolutely our position that all the data collecting belongs to the player. Certainly the player has the right, if you do wear it and data is collected: get it. Get a copy of it. Make sure you get to own it.

I will also confess that the league has not acknowledged what we absolutely believe to be true, which is the data is owned by the player. Because they haven’t acknowledged it means nothing to me. It is our position that it is owned by the player.

At this point we have not had to run into anything which creates a conflict about ownership because we do have access to it and we do have controls about its use. Including a prohibition against it being used in contract negotiations.

The next stage, there is value in that data. Given all this talk about gambling, there is a whole lot of value in the data. Our discussions are evolving, but the very first thing we wanted to do is make it the case that we could control how it was used, what it was used for, and the player would have access to it.

My final point on this, there is a wearables committee that was established during the CBA negotiations. The committee is tasked with doing two things: evaluating every wearable device that a team wants a player to wear. Evaluated for both its efficacy and that it does what it purports to do because we’re not going to be advancing and encouraging junk science. And more importantly, to make sure it’s safe.

I’ll use this analogy — it sounds weird but it works — I don’t want to find out five years now that some device that we allowed players to wear causes cancer. We’re in the final stages of identifying a laboratory that will test all these devices. That has to happen before any device can be worn.

It needs a lot more attention than it’s received in the past. I think we’re on the right track.

One last medical issue. The idea of medicinal cannabis. We have states where it’s legal, yet it’s illegal on a federal level. Players are citizens of the world. Where do you fall on this?

You’ll recall that former commissioner David Stern was interviewed by a former player who happens to have his own marijuana franchise. Stern came out and suggested the league should allow for the medicinal use of marijuana. As you might imagine, I got some phone calls and we began discussions internally with our players and to some extent with the league to at least look at it.

Everyone claims to have done their own independent study. What we want to do is agree on some experts that can sit down and talk to us. My own view is that there are substantial signs that support its efficacy and the value that it has for us, especially pain management. We’re in talks with the league to see where we can go with it.

The obvious future is that marijuana will be decriminalized probably throughout the country in short order. Don’t forget our current attorney general [Jeff Sessions], who has taken a very different approach to his tolerance for this. That makes it a little more difficult.

It is a banned substance in our league right now. If we do go down that road, we have to protect our players from — my words — a crazed attorney general who says he will prosecute violations of the law involving marijuana and he doesn’t care what individual states say.

In other words, I don’t want my guys being arrested at airports in possession of a cannabinoid by some fed. It’s against the law. So, we’ll see.

There is no medical exemption?

No. It does not exist now. We’re exploring it. I think there is some movement toward accepting it as an appropriate use to address pain. But we’re not there yet.

In Part 2 of the interview, Roberts will discuss the financial state of the league, the future of the TV deal, virtual reality, and a lot more. READ PART 2.