NBA Says Teams Must Play the National Anthem

The N.B.A. is again requiring teams to play the national anthem before games, after the Dallas Mavericks had stopped playing the anthem through their first 13 preseason and regular-season home games.

“With N.B.A. teams now in the process of welcoming fans back into their arenas, all teams will play the national anthem in keeping with longstanding league policy,” Mike Bass, an N.B.A. spokesman, said Wednesday.

The league office abruptly changed its stance on the matter after giving Mark Cuban, the Mavericks’ franchise owner, permission going into the season to stop playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before home games. All but 11 of the N.B.A.’s 30 teams are still playing home games without fans because of the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, the league had said that teams were permitted “to run their pregame operations as they see fit” because of “the unique circumstances of this season.”

The Mavericks, at Cuban’s insistence, seized on that latitude to break from a longstanding tradition in American sports and remove the anthem from their pregame program. The change went largely unnoticed until an article by The Athletic called attention to it after the team’s first game with fans in attendance, which was on Monday night. Dallas gave 1,500 free tickets to frontline workers who had received at least the first of two required shots of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/sports/basketball/nba-national-anthem-mark-cuban.html