Across The NBA, PR Wounds In The Age Of Coronavirus

Seven weeks ago, the NBA and commissioner Adam Silver were hailed for their quick and decisive response to help slow and stop the spread of the novel coronavirus when Utah center Rudy Gobert tested positive for it before a game in Oklahoma City. Perhaps as much as any act by a U.S. decision-maker in the past two months, curbing the NBA season starting on March 12 changed the national view of the coronavirus. Just the day before, teams and elected officials were debating whether to keep playing games with fans in the stands.

When Silver halted the NBA’s season at a point when there were still relatively few cases in the U.S., it made plain the nation’s new reality. Things were not going to be the same, not for a while. The NBA, leaning on science, data, and Silver’s gut feeling, was leading in a way that federal and state officials seemed unwilling to do. As often has been the case, it was a PR win for Silver and the league.

Since then, things have not gone so right for the league when it comes to molding public perception. The PR gaffes around the league have been preventable and, at times, plain dumb.

That’s been frustrating for the league. “I think there is a sense sometimes of herding cats,” one league executive said. “When Adam and the league office are dealing with a crisis under the banner of the NBA, they usually do it very effectively. But when you get teams responding in different ways and it is not all coming from New York, you get some pretty major mistakes and the team comes away with a black eye and maybe the league does, too. And we’re seeing that now.”

There have been three major foul-ups that stand out:

1.     The mom-and-pop Lakers loan

The Lakers may have fit the parameters for a federal small-business loan, as a company with only a couple hundred people on its payroll. Few small businesses, though, have at guy making $37 million at the top of their payroll sheets, as the Lakers (LeBron James) do. The small-business loan program was designed to keep mom-and-pop shops across the country afloat until the coronavirus crisis subsides, as long as they do not fire their employees. The Lakers are worth, according to Forbes’ valuation, $4.4 billion.

This week, the Lakers were found to have gotten a loan of $4.6 million from the program, which was so rife with abuse from large corporations and publicly traded companies that it ran out of money in weeks even as actual small businesses could not get access to much-needed cash. L.A. returned the loan to head off the barrage of negative PR headed its way, but there is still lingering damage as the question remains: Why were the Lakers applying for the loan to begin with?

2.     The Kings’ fake ‘donation’

On April 3, the Sacramento Bee ran a story heralding a move by the Sacramento Kings, who were, “donating their former Natomas practice facility to be used as a surge field hospital to treat patients afflicted with COVID-19.” It was a nice story—what will always be known to NBA fans as Arco Arena would be a 360-bed hospital for COVID-19 patients. Days later, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and team owner Vivek Ranadive had a press conference celebrating the Kings’ largesse.

“We at the Sacramento Kings have always believed that it’s bigger tha

n basketball,” Ranadive said. “If we can use our platform to impact the world in a positive way and make a difference, then that’s what we need to do.”

Three weeks later, after some nifty investigative work by the Bee, it was revealed that Newsom, Ranadive, and the press releases left out one minor detail: The state signed a deal to pay the Kings $500,000 per month for three months to use the arena. To its credit, the team also donated $250,000 worth of food plus 100,000 surgical masks and use of the practice facility next to the arena.

That’s a lot easier to do, though, when you’re collecting $1.5 million on an empty arena.

3.     The Sixers get ahead of themselves

On March 23, the New York Times
NYT
reported that the company that owns the Sixers and the Devils, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, would be asking its office employees to take a 20 percent pay cut and roll back to a four-day work week. In retrospect, that’s a reasonable request considering it is a sports and entertainment company and there were neither sports nor entertainment happening. Other teams were considering a similar move and there was some eagerness to see how the public would respond.

Did not go well. Fans were irate. Josh Harris, Sixers owner worth $3.7 billion, was lambasted for cutting paychecks. Sixers center Joel Embiid seemed to publicly shame the franchise by vowing to pitch in $500,000 to cover employee pay cuts.

As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes wrote on Twitter:

A day later, the Sixers and Devils reversed course and restored full paychecks.

The problem was not so much that the Sixers were wrong to roll back paychecks as a way to ensure everyone remained employed. The problem was that the team should have waited for cover from the league. That came three days later when, without much fanfare or communal anger, the NBA office cut executive salary by 20 percent.