On August 26, 2020, some of the best-known athletes in the world decided to act. Players from the National Basketball Association's Milwaukee Bucks did not arrive for their playoff game against the Orlando Magic and the league was forced to cancel the match. The Bucks refused to play the fifth game of the series in protest against the firing of an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, only few miles from where they usually play. Many teams in other American leagues followed the Bucks and Magic. Players from all NBA teams held emergency meetings, during which players requested to end the season immediately. Another major turning point related to the NBA occurred 5 months earlier, on March 18, 2020. Rudy Gobert from the Utah Jazz was the first player in the league to test positive for COVID-19 and the governors of the states decided it was time to bring many daily activities to a halt. The event that made Americans realize that COVID-19 was not going to disappear within a week or two was not President Donald Trump's announcement of a partial closure of the skies for flights from Europe that day, but rather a decision by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to stop the NBA season. Some countries returned to their routines faster than others (and their economies paid a price for it), but 2020 will probably be remembered as a year in which the pandemic was a real turning point.
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