The Bucks’ thin blue line

“I’m sure they won’t flat-out come out and say it.”

BY HENRY ABBOTT

On Sunday, August 23, police shot Jacob Blake on video in Kenosha, Wisconsin—commuting distance from Milwaukee. On Monday, in the NBA bubble in Florida, Bucks backup point guard George Hill told reporters that players never should have come to the bubble, which was a distraction from what mattered most. On Tuesday, Kyle Rittenhouse killed two Black Lives Matters protestors. At lunch on Wednesday, Hill told coaches he wouldn’t play that night. After a Zoom call from the locker room with elected officials in Wisconsin, the whole Bucks team decided to join him. Hill read a statement from Bucks players. It touched off a strike across the NBA and into other sports. The NBA had been poised for three days of elimination games, as 16 teams entered the finals games of the first round. Instead those games were all postponed.

Hill recently told Marc Spears of the Undefeated that he expected at the time his stand might cost him his job with the Bucks. And sure enough, he was traded …