Inspired by Tom Haberstroh and the Basketball Illuminati podcast, a couple of weeks ago NBA Twitter tried to make sense of a study noting that with fans absent from the stands in the NBA bubble, Black players had a boost in production. Did the absence of predominantly white and often loud and aggressive fans reduce the stress of racism? The paper is called “Inside the NBA Bubble: How Black Players Performed Better without Fans”
On today’s BRING IT IN, TrueHoop’s Jarod Hector is joined by one of the professors who led that research, Babak Somekh, as well as professor Carl Suddler who has deep experience parsing data around racism.
What was Babak and his colleagues’ impetus to dive into this topic?
As an African-American historian, what does Carl think the data might be missing?
Given the Kyrie Irving news, what do Babak and Carl think their roles as academics are in terms of educating?
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Professors Babak Somekh and Carl Suddler