Why don't you think there was any coordination? To your point about organization I'd just say all these poor folk have been looking real organized the last few weeks. Don't know if that happens with Argentinian LeBron in the finals right now. We're watching civil rights protests instead of championship parades.
First of all, nothing is impossible. Things we thought were conspiracy theories sometimes get proven true e.g. the CIA cocaine planes in the 80's or more recently, Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of elite pedophiles. So it may come out, years from now, that Donald Trump made a deal with Adam Silver where Trump thought that announcing the NBA's return would quell these negro uprisings. It's certainly an assessment I'd imagine Trump would make. That said, I think the reason for sustained urban riots coinciding with the suspension of the NBA season is more prosaic.
We have massive unemployment caused by COVID and a suspended NBA season caused by COVID. I think that most poor folks didn't need a cessation from basketball to know that the system is rigged, they needed a cessation from the relentless grind of labor to have the time to organize and act against that exploitation. There is reason why the ruling class doesn't want job security, doesn't want European levels of paid time off, wants high rents and wants student loan debt. They want you working every minute of your life and they want you in precarious position so you'll check out of politics due to intimidation over losing your livelihood, physical exhaustion or both. IMO, it's the unemployment freeing up exploited workers that has feed these sustained, coordinated and thus far very effective uprisings.
The problem with social science is that we cannot really run experiments like the physical sciences can. We will never really know what would have happened if the NBA regular season and playoffs happened along side COVID and it's economic fallout. This where journalism, right now, and history can, after the fact, pull together as much qualitative data as possible and see if NBA fans, who did join the demonstrations, would not have done so if the playoffs were on. Journalism and history may yet validate your theory.
The reason why I happen to be reticent about the idea that sports is a serious obstacle to revolution is because I've become reticent about the idea that consciousness or lack of consciousness shapes material reality. I see material conditions changing consciousness. When workers, especially workers of color, lose ground, the tendency is to check out and bury themselves in church and sports and other diversions. As soon as workers can claim victories, even slight victories, workers pull themselves away from church, sports and movies and change their consciousness and become "political" and hopefully that leads to more material victories which causes more marginalized people to decide that they are now "political" which begets more material victories. Hopefully, it ends an America ruled by a multiracial working class coalition and while people will have incorporated politics into their consciousness, we will not have discarded sports from our consciousness and we'll have a nationalized NBA to entertain us every night after our day that was split evenly between meaningful and well compensated labor and meaningful and fulfilling and family and community-centric leisure time.
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