This is a comprehensive analysis of the NBA bubble in Orlando this past season, which took place as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. The goal, is to see how the strike by the Milwaukee Bucks, after the shooting of Jacob Blake, changed the conversation surrounding the NBA. The NBA set out to make sure they went about resuming their season in not only a safe way, but also in a way that respected and highlighted the fight for social justice. There was key messaging throughout the early stages including selected messages on NBA jerseys, however after the Blake shooting players realized they weren’t doing enough and boycotted several playoff games. Here, we will see if the change by the players decision resulted in change in quality and quantity of discussion around the NBA.

Overall Bubble:

First looking at what the chatter around the entirety of the NBA bubble looked like, we start with total volume.

There was quite a bit of volume surrounding the bubble with three crucial peaks. Peak C, the third highest, was the start date of the season resuming and peak B, the second highest, was the end of the season when the Los Angeles Lakers became NBA champions. Peak A, by far the most conversation of the summer, was the day of the Milwaukee Bucks strike.

Now, taking a step further we look at the emotion behind the conversations. Sadness was the prevailing emotion with happiness and then anger not far behind. The day of the boycott saw the most sadness while the end of the season saw the most happiness.

Looking at some of trending terms people spoke on the NBA bubble, we see that overall, the talk is all basketball focused except for the word “black” which could be in reference to movements and organizations like “Black Lives Matter” or could be referencing other things as well. Clearly most of the conversation was basketball-centric.

Before the Strike:

Now that we’ve looked at the volume and sentiment of the overall bubble, we will begin to break it down into segments starting with the period leading up to the boycott.

The total mentions in this range of time about 6 million with the peak on day one of the season before swiftly dropping. We can see the number jumping up and down, but generally averaging out to about 200k mentions per day.

While sadness was the prevailing emotion overall, it is less clear in this breakdown with happiness looking just as strong. Anger and disgust are still present, but the negative emotions, from research, are also associated with fans whose teams were performing poorly.

A different look at the breakdown shows that the number of joyful and sad posts are about identical, so clearly the ratio of happy/sad mentions was quite high/even in the period before the strike.

The word cloud for this period is quite similar to the overall word cloud, with a lot of the same topics and a heavy focus on basketball related terms. Again, the only term added to the mix here that could interpreted as social justice related is the word “black”.

After the Strike:

The days after the strike were still met with a lot of boycott centric talk given that the initial Bucks strike was not the only one. Other teams followed suit in the following days.

We can see this from the fact that the volume was still very high in the days after the strike before declining and lands at around 200-250k mentions per day. From the time after the strike to the end of the season, there were 12 million mentions overall. While there were more days in this span, if we divide the total by the number of days we can see that the exact breakdown was about 220k mentions per day before the boycott and about 270k after.

Looking at the emotional breakdown, we see a very high peak of sadness right after the boycott, and the period ended with a spike of joy, largely attributed to LA fans celebrating their victory.

From our second look at the emotional breakdown, we see that sadness did dominate this season segment, which is not surprising. What is surprising is that anger, another emotion associated with the boycotts, took a slight decline in its percentage of the mentions.

In this word cloud we still see the basketball-themed domination for the others, specifically referring to the Finals, Lakers and Lebron James. We do see additions like “police” and “country” so there is more variety here.

The Boycott:

Now finally a brief look at what the day of the Bucks boycott, August 26th, looked like.

The exact number of mentions on this day was 1,792,317. This whopping number is approaching a third of the mentions in the entire period leading up to that day. The sentiment is very dominantly sad, in reference to the Jacob Blake shooting.

Now here, we finally have a unique word cloud that shows the conversation had completely shifted that day. We see “boycott”, “Jacob Blake”, “black man”, “Kaepernick”, “support”, “protest”, and more. It is clear that people took serious notice of this moment in history and it resonated with them.

Conclusion:

Now, looking at the final breakdown of information. What is clear is that despite their best efforts, basketball was going to be the dominating theme throughout the bubble. What is also clear, is that the Bucks stepping up and starting a series of boycotts turned this narrative around and completely changed the discussion if only for a week or even a day.

If it were not for the boycott the NBA season would have made a marginal societal and conversational impact, but the key catalyst in all of this was that day, August 26th, when they Bucks said no.