When it happened, it happened fast. After hours of rumors, after weeks of unease, after months of conversations about how the NBA could come back, whether it should come back, whether it would be doing more harm than good by staging a basketball competition in the midst of both a devastating pandemic and an international wave of protest against the killing of Black people by police—after all that, the Milwaukee Bucks’ decision not to take the court Wednesday night for the fifth game of their first-round playoff series against the Orlando Magic still seemed to arrive with astounding speed. The Bucks themselves planned to play when they arrived at the arena, according to members of the team. One minute the Magic were going through warm-ups, the next minute NBA officials were having urgent conversations outside the Milwaukee locker room, and the minute after that, everything about the current state of affairs governing sports, politics, and protest had changed.

The Bucks chose not to play Game 5 after Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, was shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday. Blake was trying to get into his car, where his three small children were waiting. The Bucks assumed they would be made to forfeit their game against the Magic; instead, their impromptu strike set a row of dominoes falling that almost halted American sports. The Rockets and Thunder agreed to sit out their playoff game, which had been scheduled to follow the Bucks’. Then the whole night’s slate of games was postponed. The WNBA postponed its full slate as well. In Major League Baseball, the Milwaukee Brewers and Cincinnati Reds called off their game. Naomi Osaka, the two-time Grand Slam winner who has become one of the biggest celebrities in women’s tennis, announced that she was withdrawing from her semifinal match in the Western & Southern Open. Then the entire tournament paused play. Major League Soccer players across the league refused to play. Five games ended up being postponed.

[Read Brian Phillips's piece on the political contradictions currently on display within the NBA.]