War and Basketball

Growing up in Orlando, Florida in the late 1990s, basketball was by far the primary sport my friends and I cared about. We had a minor league ice hockey team, the Solar Bears, and I once attended a Tampa Bay Rays game, but basketball was the only major league sport in Orlando and the only one I consistently played, and the Orlando Magic are, to this day, the main professional sports team I still root for, despite living in New York for 20 years. 

My friends and I attended JCC summer basketball camp in central Florida. Most attendees were not Jewish, but in the post-Shaq era, when the Magic were searching for a new center, we got to meet the 6’11” and Jewish Danny Schayes. Danny’s father Dolph played in the NBA in the 1950s and early 1960s, and was selected as one of the 50 greatest players in the league’s history in 1996. People brag about Jews winning Nobel Prizes, but the first basket scored in the history of the Basketball Association of America (BAA), which later became the NBA, was by a young Jewish man on the Knicks named Ossie Schechtman.

Newsweek once wrote that basketball is a sport “at which Jews excel,” but after many years without any notable Jews in the league, we are back in the spotlight in the NBA. Deni Avdija, a player from Israel currently playing for the Portland Trailblazers, made his first All-Star appearance this season. Avdija is a solid player; in the absence of Damian Lillard, he has put up 25 points per game, and various Jewish publications have been singing his praises. Avdija is proud to be Israeli. He served in the IDF, and in the summer of 2025 he played for the Israeli team in the FIBA Eurocup, nearly edging out Greece (Franz Wagner of the Orlando Magic led Germany to victory). He hangs an Israeli flag in his locker in Portland. 

I feel no sense of pride in Avdija’s accomplishments. My relationship to Jewishness and Israel has shifted significantly since childhood, and relating to a player like Avdija is difficult. I went to Israel once, for Birthright in 2009; I was there when another IDF incursion into Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, resulted in 1,417 dead Palestinians, 83% of whom were civilians. 

Beyond Avdija, the NBA is embroiled in actual controversies surrounding Israel: it has come to light that two of the league’s perennial All-Stars, Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors and Kevin Durant of the Houston Rockets, have significant connections to Israeli tech and military companies. LeBron James faced criticism when he said he “would like to visit Israel one day,” despite his overtures to social justice. The Warriors’ Draymond Green was roundly criticized for being pictured on an IDF gun range.

Why would the actions of the players differ from those of the billionaires who own the teams they play for? It was recently revealed that the owner of the Grizzlies, Robert Pera, has been supplying crucial drone equipment to the Russian military. Materiel from Pera’s company, Ubiquiti, has been found on the frontlines in Ukraine and some claim it was used in attacks against civilians. In 2014, Pera’s Ubiquiti violated sanctions in place against Iran and was fined $500,000 by the U.S. government. Miriam Adelson, widow of the late Israel megadonor Sheldon Adelson, is the de facto owner of the Mavericks and invests heavily in Israel and donates to AIPAC. The league itself has cultivated ties to the UAE (whose relationship with Israel has expanded rapidly since Israel opened diplomatic offices there in 2015), which sponsors the in-season tournament, the NBA Cup, introduced in 2023, and the Knicks and the 76ers played an exhibition game in Abu Dhabi in October. Human rights groups have accused the UAE of using slave labor to build sports stadiums. Their bids to host FIFA world cups and ties to the NBA have prompted human rights groups to coin the term “sportswashing,” an attempt to distract media away from the labor abuses, akin to Israel’s “pinkwashing,” which touts the country’s LGBTQ rights in order to divert attention from apartheid. 

War is far from the NBA’s only shady moneymaking venture. Sports betting has been around for decades, but was never encouraged by the NBA. The Bradley Act made it illegal in 1992, though it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018 (a move encouraged by commissioner of the league, Adam Silver, in a 2014 op-ed). Betting platforms, such as FanDuel, have provided the league with over $1.6 billion in sponsorships. Americans placed $147.9 billion in bets in 2024, a 23.6% increase from the prior year. Former NBA champion turned coach Chauncey Billups was arrested in 2025 for gambling with insider information. 

Draymond Green(@Money23Green) was a guest today of the Israeli SWAT Dep. pic.twitter.com/ze9Ubztv22

— Or Shkedy (@Orshkedy) July 4, 2018

Why would the actions of the players differ from that of the billionaires who own the teams they play for? It was recently revealed that the owner of the Grizzlies, Robert Pera, has been supplying crucial drone equipment to the Russian military. Materiel from Pera’s company, Ubiquiti, has been found on the frontlines in Ukraine and some claim used in attacks against civilians. In 2014, Pera’s Ubiquiti violated sanctions in place against Iran and was fined $500,000 by the U.S. government. Miriam Adelson, widow of the late Israel megadonor Sheldon Adelson, is the de facto owner of the Mavericks, and invests heavily in Israel and donates to AIPAC. The league itself has cultivated ties to the UAE (whose relationship with Israel has expanded rapidly since Israel opened diplomatic offices there in 2015), which sponsors the in-season tournament, the NBA Cup, introduced in 2023; and the Knicks and the 76ers played an exhibition game in Abu Dhabi in October. Human rights groups have accused the UAE of using slave labor to build sports stadiums. Their bids to host FIFA world cups and ties to the NBA have prompted human rights groups to coin the term “sportswashing,” an attempt to distract media away from the labor abuses, akin to Israel’s “pinkwashing,” which touts the country’s LGBTQ rights in order to divert attention from apartheid. 

War is far from the NBA’s only shady moneymaking venture. Sports betting has been around for decades, but was never encouraged by the NBA. The Bradley Act made it illegal in 1992, though it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018 (a move encouraged by commissioner of the league, Adam Silver, in a 2014 op-ed). Betting platforms, such as FanDuel, have provided the league with over $1.6 billion in sponsorships. Americans placed $147.9 billion in bets in 2024, a 23.6% increase from the prior year. Former NBA Champion turned coach Chauncey Billups was arrested in 2025 for gambling with insider information. 

Coinciding with the rise of legal sports betting is the NBA’s ties to cryptocurrency companies, which spent $565 million in global sports sponsorship for the 2024-2025 season, an increase of 20% from the year before. Steph Curry was named in the lawsuit that sent FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to prison for 25 years. The untraceable nature of crypto currency means it can be used to skirt sanctions; Russia and Iran have both done so.

The NBA’s foreign investments, alongside the preponderance of sports betting advertisements and sponsors, as well as ties to crypto, evoke what theorist Maurizio Lazzarato defines in his book “War and Money: The Imperialism of the Dollar” as a new era of capitalism, beyond neoliberalism. Government, he argues, is now concerned primarily with speculative finance and military ventures that lead to actual warfare: 

“Normal competitive market forces, which are supposed to ensure balance and prevent war, are being replaced by the strategies of investment groups, multinational corporations, pension funds and, above all, large states. These actors dictate power relations through economics, politics and military action; in combining economic, technological, and monetary warfare they lead us eventually to armed confrontation. This so-called competition is not strictly economic; it is a struggle between great economic-political powers that is regulated not by the market, but rather by direct power relations and war.”  

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza are outgrowths of this global economy; they are not aberrations, but necessary developments to maintain capitalist expansion. The NBA has not commented on players supporting Israel or team owners selling drone parts to Russia. Pablo Torre, the independent sports journalist who broke the news about Ubiquiti, said that he does not expect the league to care about Palestine, but he does expect their PR to be better. It seems that the NBA isn’t trying very hard to redirect public discourse around war profiteering.   

Under such conditions, it’s hardly surprising that basketball fans aren’t seeing their values represented in the athletes on these teams. Very few are public about their politics (apart from perhaps Natasha Cloud, who sometimes sports a keffiyeh), even as they invest heavily in Israeli companies. The most visible player in support of Palestine, Kyrie Irving, one of the most talented ball handlers of all time, found himself embroiled in an antisemitism controversy in 2022 when he shared a link on Instagram to the film “Hebrew to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” which pushes conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the media and denies that the Holocaust happened. Amazon has refused to stop distributing the film. Irving was suspended for several games, paid a $500,000 fine, and was criticized widely, including by Joe Tsai, the owner of the Nets, for whom Irving played at the time. Throughout the Gaza genocide Irving has continued to support Palestine while Barclays, where he used to play, has hosted exhibition games for Israeli teams. 

While Irving’s post was called out for spreading legitimately antisemitic ideas, other players have found themselves at the center of antisemitism controversies for simply expressing support for Palestine. Dwight Howard, Orlando’s great hope in the 2009 NBA finals, recently told the media that the commissioner of the league ordered him to delete an X post that read “Free Palestine” in 2014. The NBA denies the phone call took place. It’s not a surprise that Irving supports some progressive causes while allegedly finding inspiration in unsavory places; when even modest support for Palestine – which almost none of your peers share – is met with such forceful criticism, people will be drawn to conspiratorial thinking. 

After making big, promising moves in the off-season, the Orlando Magic are having a rough year defined by numerous injuries affecting star players and winning just over 50% of their games. Franz Wagner has missed 35 games and Paolo Banchero is barely averaging more points than he did during his rookie year. The Charlotte Hornets could eliminate them from a playoff spot. 

I am no longer on speaking terms with my family. My sister moved to Israel over a decade ago, and my parents are dual citizens. They have all cut ties with me. There seems little possibility that I will ever attend a Magic game with my family again, and it’s very sad to not get a happy birthday text from them. But there are thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children who have no possibility of reconnecting with their parents. Of the more than 70,000 Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023, 800 were athletes. This includes Majed Abu Maraheel, who was the first Palestinian to compete at the Olympics, and their first flag bearer at the 1996 games in Atlanta, which I attended. 

Sport is a unifying human experience, but the social cohesion that it brings us is now threatened. The seemingly innocuous threats, like crypto or gambling, are in fact tied to sport’s larger issues of nationalism and war. A professional sports' league that encourages fans to make sketchy bets will, in the current political climate, have no issue with billionaire team owners investing in sketchy foreign markets or the military machinery of death. NBA fans, Jewish or otherwise, cannot simply like or dislike Deni Avdija; he is now a signifier, and having an informed opinion on him means confronting Israeli war crimes. It means examining the league’s connection to foreign investments, and finally questioning our political-economic system that allows team owners to invest in war with little to no repercussions. Deeper political engagement with the things that seem mundane, and especially something so quintessentially American as professional sport, can give us important analytical tools to cut through to deep fissures in the Western world, and the comfort and luxury that comes at the expense of people’s lives.