The NBA No Cursing Policy: A Digital Marketing Perspective

When the National Basketball Association implemented a ‘no bling’ dress code in 2005, at the height of the ‘Jiggy Era,’ accusations of racism quickly followed. Seventeen years later, we’re back where we started, with another older white commissioner, Adam Silver, calling for a new ‘no cursing’ policy.

Before we consider whether restricting players’ language/voice is a smart branding/marketing or employee experience strategy, let’s rewind to the time of the Malice at the Palace, which some say sparked the concerns about players acting — and looking — like “thugs.” 

The NBA Dress Code Policy

It was 2005, and rappers, ball players and people of all ages were wearing designer warmups, baggy jerseys and chunky gold chains. When then-commissioner David Stern announced that the league would require “business casual” attire, players and the press called the move a reactionary response to a growing trend of predominantly Black players taking fashion cues from trendsetter and future basketball hall-of-famer Allen Iverson. Iverson, of course, was a very popular player — and a proverbial thorn in Stern’s side; the league forced Iverson to cover his tattoos during games, and even airbrushed them out in promotional materials. 

Stern’s banned item list, meanwhile, included headgear, jerseys, do-rags, chains, pendants and medallions (in addition to shorts, T-shirts, sneakers and flip-flips), pointing directly to Black, urban fashion and further cementing for many people the belief that the NBA was racializing appearance and targeting non-white players. "They're targeting my generation — the hip-hop generation," Iverson said at the time. "You can put a murderer in a suit and he's still a murderer." Iverson, along with Denver's Marcus Camby, asked the NBA for a clothing stipend so they could conform to the code. Even Tim Duncan, the NBA’s “most boring” player, called the rule “a load of crap.”

As Elliot Wilson, then editor of top-three Hip Hop magazine XXL, put it, Stern’s move “allows the men in charge to think that they have reclaimed the NBA’s value system — and they now have a league that reflects their taste and what they believe in.”

Years later, Stern would recount that the NBA Players Association had initially approved of the 2005 dress code policy, but “then they attacked me on it. And then our players [did too].” According to a Washington Post article at the time, “the NBA had tried mightily to fuse its product with hip-hop culture, viewing its young players and their street fashion sense as a way to connect with a new generation of fans in the post-Michael Jordan era.” But, instead, “Stern and some of his closest advisers concluded, they might be driving fans away from the sport.”

In retrospect, I find that hard to believe. So did public figures and marketing experts back then. Joseph Anthony, the CEO of Vital Marketing, an urban youth marketing company, told the Post, "It's an odd decision for a league that's main draw is the individuality of its players to attempt to create anonymity among its ranks." 

Mark Cuban, the eccentric billionaire owner of the fast-rising Dallas Mavericks, is still wearing T-shirts on the arena floor, and told reporters in 2005:

Some in the NBA want things to work purely in a way they are comfortable with rather than understanding players, communicating with them and understanding how the players can bring added value by dressing to fit the customer, rather than dressing to fit senior management.

Seems like Cuban understood diversity, equity and inclusion well before most.

Famed filmmaker Spike Lee, a fixture at New York Knicks games at Madison Square Garden, said he too could understand players’ and fans’ cries of hypocrisy, since:

• The league had, especially in recent years, focused their marketing on young players like Iverson
• Many arenas had co-opted Hip Hop music
• Hip Hop stars like Jay-Z, Usher and Nelly are co-owners of NBA franchises

On the other hand, Charles Barkley, the hall-of-fame former player and TV analyst who famously said “I am not a role model,” agreed that there was a racial undercurrent to the dress code policy — but characteristically argued for it:

Young Black kids dress like NBA players. Unfortunately, they don't get paid like NBA players. So when they go out in the real world, what they wear is held against them… If a well-dressed white kid and a Black kid wearing a do-rag and throwback jersey came to me in a job interview, I'd hire the white kid. That's reality.

An unfortunate reality, to this day — and, in the opinion of this writer, a prime example of ‘blaming the victim.’ 

Why should our prejudices influence the future — or personal expression — of another human being? Why should the majority impose its values on the minority? 

Or, in this case — with three quarters of the NBA being Black, less than half of NBA fans being white, and only 26% of NBA fans being registered Republicans — why should the minority dictate ‘right and wrong’ for the majority? Morals aside, the reason was money: the NBA thought ‘cleaning up the league’ would improve its brand reputation and put more butts in the seats. The NBA was wrong. The NBA’s biggest fans are between 18 and 34, and young people don’t want dad or grandpa telling them how to dress. The dress code didn’t improve NBA branding, it alienated more than half of its audience.

In fact, this “live unscripted drama” even sparked scholarly investigation. In After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness, David Leonard argues that David Stern “seized on the fear central to the media discourse [after the Malice at the Palace, featuring Ron Artest] and used/exploited it in order to implement a series of reforms… designed to protect the NBA’s economic solvency.” Leonard also points out, though, that David Ganis, president of Chicago consulting firm Sports Corp Limited, said in 2005 that there actually wasn’t a “monetary backlash” against the NBA at all; it was, in fact, “cultural.”

It appears Stacy L. Lorenz and Rod Murray would agree. In “‘Goodbye to the Gangstas:’ The NBA Dress Code, Ray Emery, and the Policing of Blackness in Basketball and Hockey” for the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, the professors state:

With Black players constituting a significant majority of NBA rosters—and in light of the league’s previous promotion of its connections to hip-hop and the “street” (Lane, 2007)—the dress code quickly became part of a wider discussion about racial politics, marketing, and ‘Black style’ (Oriard, 2007) in the sport. As Phillip Lamarr Cunningham (2009) notes, ‘the NBA’s rules inherently and intentionally penalize a majority of its Black players’ (p. 40).

And if you still think it was unintentional, perhaps what 11-time NBA champion head coach Phil Jackson said at the time will convince you otherwise: "The players have been dressing in prison garb the last five or six years…. All the stuff that goes on, it's like gangsta, thuggery stuff.”

Which brings us to the present day. 

The NBA No Cursing Policy

Howard Beck told SiriusXM NBA Radio that he had a great time writing a May 2022 Sports Illustrated story on the NBA’s “$@&!*% problem” — because he got to curse more than usual. Cursing is, after all, a racially blind reality that concerns some but doesn’t phase many.

Here’s what Beck says:

Sometime in the last year, NBA executives noticed something alarming—like, really fucking alarming: press conferences peppered with profanities, f-bombs flying freely. S-bombs and other assorted bombs, too. So before it could turn into a full-blown shitstorm, the league decided to act. Memos were sent, warnings issued, fingers wagged. The message? Curtail the cursing, or pay the price for your impudence. Then came the fines.

A lot of fines. The most in two decades. Why?

According to the NBA’s president of league operations, Byron Spruell, “decorum” — which sounds startlingly similar to the tone policing Black people experience in the workplace.

“The league just has standards that we have to uphold,” Spruell told Beck. “We get the emotion. We get the sort of element of authenticity. We’re not trying to take that away in any of this around the game, and their expressions on and off the court. But at the same time, we do have standards that we wanted to come back to and message very hard this year.”

The emotion, for anyone unfamiliar, comes not only from a professional athlete’s competitiveness, but from the epithets and insults hurled from the crowd. And the standards, of course, were established back in 2005 when David Stern hired Republican campaign strategist Matthew Dowd to ‘repair the league’s reputation.’ But why did the NBA and its commissioner Adam Silver decide to “message very hard” this year?

Well, this is the first year that players played a full season in front of fans since the COVID outbreak and the nation’s longest period of sustained protest. In 2020, the league was painting “Black Lives Matter'' on its courts, allowing players to wear (certain, league-selected) socio-political messages on their jerseys, and pledging $300-million to “empowering Black communities” through its newly chartered NBA Foundation (in 2005, David Stern launched NBA Cares, it’s social responsibility program, on the heels of his dress code announcement.) But as the NBA was painting over all the “Black Lives Matter'' sidelines and withdrawing the vast majority of its NBA Foundation advertising in 2021, Americans were experiencing an even more deadly and polarizing “year of civil unrest,” starting with the January 6 US Capital attack and concluding with more unarmed civilians killed by police than in the previous eight years. And in 2022, with racially motivated mass shootings nearly every day and Black voter suppression expanding nationwide, NBA ticketholders — excited to be back in the arena — have, according to the players, never been more vitriolic or hateful in their mid-game attacks. 

As Beck puts it in his SI article, “there’s a distinct irony in fining [NBA] players for cursing while thousands of Boston fans were free to chant ‘Fuck Kyrie’ at a game last month, or while thousands of Toronto fans were free to taunt 76ers star Joel Embiid with chants of ‘Fuck Embiid.’ Great point. And the things said by individual fans to individual players are even worse. Just ask Serbian-born superstar (and my favorite player) Luka Dončić.

Yet, the NBA is even policing player language in print interviews — putting Nuggets center DeMarcus Cousins “on notice” for comments made to Andscape — and hasn’t ruled out coming for the players’ own podcasts!

The biggest slights of all, though, are probably that there’s nothing in the collective bargaining agreement prohibiting cursing, and the NBA never even consulted with the Players Association (NBPA) before publicizing its new ‘decorum’ campaign. 

Think about it: if your employer told you how to speak outside the office, wouldn’t you be concerned?

• Cursing has been proven to have “no measurable negative impact on those who are exposed to it” 
• Cursing is now “a staple” of cable television and streaming services
• The very periodicals that cover the NBA print profanities in full

Not only that, young people — across races and geographies — “don’t care about profanity,” says Ben Bergen, cognitive science professor and author of What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves. “So it’s not younger U.S. viewers they’re looking to win over by banning swearing.”

Um, then who is the NBA’s target audience?

In a recent statement, the NBPA said:

Players showing emotion by cursing or using other strong language is not new and is something that will continue to naturally occur, considering the intensity and extremely high level of competition in our league.

The statement is true and straightforward. It doesn’t invoke race. And that’s exactly why it doesn’t go far enough.

I asked Chuck Modiano, who writes about race and sports for Deadspin, for his take on the new policy. His response was pretty damning (sorry for cursing):

The NBA’s new cursing policy is not only ridiculous, it’s racist. It’s racist because it’s just a continuation of an NBA business model that prioritizes appeasing the feelings of older white fans over the humanity of its own Black players.  And it’s not new, especially in the post-Michael Jordan era. Whether it’s fighting, fouling or now just saying “fuck,” we just don’t see this level of hyper-policing in whiter sports like MLB or the NHL. And it’s not just the NBA. It’s the NFL owners’ blackballing of Kaepernick to appease its most bigoted segment of older white fans; it’s tennis super-fining Serena Williams for misbehavior that gets John McEnroe paid in commercials. Ultimately, the NBA’s never-ending stop-and-frisk policing of Black humanity is a symbolic reflection of our actual racist policing and criminal justice system. And if we fail to recognize the former, we have little hope to solve the latter.

Of course, the problem extends from the courts and the fields to the corporate offices and boardrooms.

Although Black people account for more than 13% of the US population, only four Fortune 500 companies have Black CEOs and Black people only occupy 3% of senior leadership roles across all US companies with 100 or more employees. Up and down the corporate ladder, job candidates with “African American-sounding names” receive 14% fewer calls for jobs than those with “white-sounding names.” Meanwhile, women only make up 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 20% of all C-suite roles. And even when women, Black people and people of color (such as Latin Americans and Indigenous peoples) hold leadership positions, they make less than their white male counterparts. To this day, Black men earn 13% less and Latin Americans make 9% less than white people with the same qualifications; Black women earn 40% less! And across genders, Black and Latin American employees with bachelor’s degrees earn nearly 25% less than white and Asian workers. In other words, nearly six decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, “we find equal pay for equal work is still not a reality.”

Beyond instances of outright racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc., this enduring phenomenon can be attributed to what Jackson Gruver, a data analyst at PayScale, calls “opportunity gap” and “occupational segregation:” Talented young people from less advantaged backgrounds aren’t being hired because companies are recruiting from a shallow pool of elite university graduate candidates and hiring only those who “fit in” with the (homogenous) company culture.

While the NBA certainly doesn’t have a hiring problem, with teams recruiting and signing players from a variety of backgrounds, the idea of “fitting in” with the company culture does apply. Who creates a company culture? Simple: the people who work for that company. And as marketing expert Josh Bersin points out, the companies that best handle race and other complex issues are the “really good listeners.” In fact, he says, the greatest contributor to their success is their listening, hearing and acting — on “what employees want to talk about.” 

Need proof? This season’s one-sided ‘decorum’ decision is already widening rifts between players and team management, between teams and league management, and between NBA fans and the 75-year-old league. And like their lower-paid predecessors in 2005, today’s players aren’t shying away from sharing their opinions on the NBA’s latest sneak attack — or the “verbal abuse” they endure from opposing fans during games. 

Predictably, with the players’ massive, captive social media audiences, what began as a mostly internal dispute is turning into a very-public fan backlash. And, in case you (or the NBA) missed it, employee experience is the new customer experience. Two thirds of American consumers are now actively choosing to buy from brands whose values reflect their own. As a result, I don’t see anyone from the Gen Z (or millennial) generation becoming a bigger NBA fan because their favorite players are being censored. I see the world’s most fervent fans spending less at NBA stores and stadiums — and more on individual players’ brands — because the NBA no longer reflects their values.

There’s a long history of white people and people in power telling Black people how to dress and speak, (while co-opting their style and slang); Kareem Abdul-Jabbar famously risked his career speaking out against racism in the 1970s, but in 2014 mainstream media news pundit Laura Ingraham was still venomously telling players (including Lebron James and fellow world champion Kevin Durant) to “shut up and dribble.”

'Shut up and dribble' — Fox News's Laura Ingraham to LeBron and Kevin Durant after their criticism of President Trump pic.twitter.com/0BlokQDIIl

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) February 16, 2018

In today’s increasingly global, inclusive society (and league), Adam Silver’s racially charged ‘no cursing’ policy seems at best impulsive and insensitive. Many of the modern-era NBA’s most popular players — like Lebron and Durant, or future hall-of-famers Carmelo Anthony and Damian Lillard — are overtly political, leveraging their fame to amplify racial and social justice causes, marching at protests and meeting with political leaders in an effort to influence change. For a smart multi-billion-dollar business, it would logically follow, then, that the players’ fans support the players’ stances and actions. 

Since the fans are the customers, who deliver the revenue upon which the NBA relies for survival, the league probably should have surveyed its employees and run focus groups with fans before condemning some of the world’s brightest stars for using words my kids and their friends say in school.

As would be expected of any company, organization or institution, the NBA’s predominantly older, white, male top brass should not be making major decisions that significantly impact 500-plus young, predominantly Black employees — especially without input. This is not how you demonstrate empathy or develop long-lasting customer relationships. It’s certainly not the gold-paved road to producing brand ambassadors who amplify your reach for free.

As I explain in my guide to social media marketing through the customer lifecycle, the number-one way to maintain long-term, high-value customer relationships is to focus on the customer, and not the sale. Indeed, once you’ve converted a lead into a paying customer, you have the opportunity to begin developing loyalty in the hopes of creating a brand ambassador or influencer — but you also have the opportunity to turn them off completely. To provide value on an ongoing basis, the NBA should’ve asked questions, listened, and then used the information to improve its product and messaging. Hopefully you don’t make the same mistake; you may not have the cash to overcome it.

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Ruslan Ruslan on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/AhAMJgq5QPM
2. Photo by Nicolas Steave on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/3edrI-sDj7g
3. Photo by qi xna on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/Ii7adwWwNh4
4. Photo by Бодьсанал Boogie on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/WJ47ZR2kuY8
5. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/qT7fZVbDcqE
6. Photo by matthew reyes on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/to5c0vh5FSQ
7. Photo by Maik Kleinert on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/MQelXzancIk