As you know, it’s tradition for championship teams to visit the White House. Today (Nov. 10) the Cleveland Cavaliers are scheduled to visit the White House with Barack Obama. Jalen Rose and others suspect it will be the last team a full team makes the visit for at least the next four years.
Cavaliers’ LeBron James and J.R. Smith campaigned for Hillary Clinton and expressed deep disappointment in Donald Trump winning the presidential election. Many people believe it will come down to them and the Warriors again in the NBA Finals, should they win again, it’s unlikely they’ll want to meet with Trump.
The Cavs are going to the White House tomorrow. One of them speculated they may be the last NBA team to do that for a while.
— Lee Jenkins (@SI_LeeJenkins) November 9, 2016
Should the Warriors win, coach Steve Kerr is not fond of Trump either and ripped into the president-elect. During ESPN’s NBA Countdown on Wednesday, analyst Jalen Rose expressed that many other players in both the NBA and NFL share that sentiment. In fact, many of them did express disappointment in Trump winning.
Rose said:
“While personal politics in general can by a divisive topic. And for Donald Trump, during his candidacy, he became a polarizing candidate, which included along the way, insulting a lot of people. So those same people today as American citizens have to digest that he’s going to be the next president of the United States. How it’s going to affect sports? Unlike Tom Brady, when his team won the championship, and he chose not to go to the White House, saying it was a scheduling conflict when Barack Obama was in office. What we’re going to see in professional sports — NBA and NFL — mark my words, there will be players that decline the opportunity to visit the White House under his presidency.”
