NBA Players Alarmed, Commissioner Saddened by Thabo Sefolosha-NYPD Incident

NEW YORK — The scene is, by now, familiar: A black man, seemingly posing no threat, wrestled violently to the ground by police officers on a New York street.

Last July, it was Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who was put in a choke hold by a police officer and died soon after.

"I can't breathe," Garner said repeatedly in a video of the incident.

"I Can't Breathe" proclaimed the T-shirts worn by dozens of NBA players last December, after a grand jury declined to indict the officer.

"The issue is about us feeling safe," Brooklyn Nets guard Jarrett Jack explained then.

A new video circulated recently, of another black man, taken down by another set of New York police officers. This man did not die, but he did have his leg broken.

This man was an NBA player—the Atlanta Hawks' Thabo Sefolosha—and suddenly the wave of social consciousness that surged through NBA locker rooms last year has taken on a new and personal dimension.

Sefolosha's violent arrest on April 8, captured on video and beamed into every NBA arena, sent tremors across the league. Players responded with a mix of shock and anger. The National Basketball Players Association said it was investigating the incident. The NBA's security division, staffed by former police and FBI officers, is making its own inquiries, while awaiting a result of the NYPD's internal probe.

"It's just real eye-opening," Jack told Bleacher Report this week, "because that's not a normal story. That whole scene isn't normal, having a video of a professional athlete getting taken down."

Normal, no. But hardly unfamiliar in its broadest strokes. For months, the news has been filled with allegations of racially charged police misconduct and police brutality, from Staten Island to Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, to Charlottesville, Virginia, to North Charleston, South Carolina.

There is a groundswell of concern nationwide about police misconduct, and that concern is acutely felt in NBA locker rooms, where three-quarters of the players are black. The Garner case in particular moved NBA players, stoking their collective social conscience in a way that few events have in recent years.    

Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls was the first to don an "I Can't Breathe" T-shirt, in the wake of the grand jury verdict in the Garner case. The message and the movement quickly spread: To Brooklyn, where LeBron James and his Cavaliers teammates wore the shirts before a game against the Nets, and to Los Angeles, where Kobe Bryant and his Lakers teammates did the same.

At the time, Bryant said it was not just a "race issue," but a "justice issue."

Jack, who distributed the shirts to the Nets and Cavaliers that night, said then, "The issue is about us feeling safe, and understanding that people are going to be able to protect us when necessary, and we won't get harmed in the process."

The Sefolosha case is not on the scale of the others. No guns were fired, no lives lost. But the concerns about police conduct are the same: Did the officers overreact that night?

Why was Sefolosha singled out?

The publicly available information so far is inconclusive, but the visuals—provided by TMZ—are troubling. Multiple officers grab Sefolosha and force him down to the pavement. A second video appears to show one officer striking Sefolosha with a baton, while stunned witnesses yell, "Stop! Stop!" and "He didn't do anything!"

At some point, Sefolosha sustained a fractured fibula and ligament damage in his right leg. Although he has so far declined to speak in detail about the incident, Sefolosha issued a statement that said, bluntly, "The injury was caused by the police."

Addressing the larger issues of police conduct, Jack said, "It's anger when it's anybody," but with Sefolosha, "it's more personal. We're a very, very small fraternity as far as players are concerned in this league. And to have that done to one of our NBA brothers, I think everybody probably felt that way. Who knows if that kid will ever be able to do what he loves at a high level again?"

Sefolosha, a nine-year veteran, is known across the league as a consummate professional, a selfless teammate and a generally low-key, even-keeled individual—a "great dude," in the words of Caron Butler, who played with Sefolosha last season in Oklahoma City. He is the opposite of a troublemaker, and maybe the last person anyone would expect to see in a police blotter—or a disturbing cellphone video on TMZ.

In that video, Sefolosha can be heard yelling, "Relax! Relax!" before the officers close in and wrestle him to the ground. His Hawks teammate, Pero Antic, was also arrested at the scene.

Sefolosha was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, although it remains unclear why police arrested him in the first place.

"In viewing the video, he was saying, 'relax'—and 'relax' doesn't sound like a resisting word to me," Jack said.

Butler said he was stunned when he heard about the arrest.

"Just knowing Thabo, and the type of guy that he is, I really doubt that he was in the wrong or in any gray area," said Butler, who figured that Sefolosha was probably "trying to help somebody or resolve the situation" before the police intervened.

"He's always been a guy that's sacrificed," Butler said. "You look at him playing for Oklahoma City for all these years, being a starter on one of the premier teams. He can score the ball, put it on the floor, do all these things. But he sacrificed himself, his body. He has a certain form of professionalism that he brings to the game on a day-to-day basis, on and off the court. He's a guy that conducts himself in the right manner and shows leadership. And just to see him act out of body, would be, it would just be shocking to me. I don't see that coming from him."

Butler added, "If I had to put a good dude next to the definition of 'good dude' in the dictionary, he'd be one of my candidates to put up there."

That was the general impression also given by commissioner Adam Silver, who traveled with Sefolosha to South Africa for a Basketball Without Borders event two years ago.

"My initial reaction as a friend was to feel incredibly empathetic to him," Silver said Friday. "I don't think, to the extent the police, based on what we all saw in that video, may have broken his leg, doesn't speak to justification, and I think that's the ultimate issue."

While Silver strove to take a neutral stance for the time being, he said, "It's a huge loss for the league to not have him on the floor, obviously a huge loss to the Atlanta Hawks to not have a player of his skill going to the playoffs."

Sefolosha signed with Atlanta last summer, providing added grit and defensive depth to a Hawks team that won 60 games this season. He would have been one of the primary options to guard James, or Chicago's Jimmy Butler, in the later rounds of the playoffs. Instead, he is recovering from surgery while his arrest serves as another ugly chapter in the ongoing debate over police conduct.

"It's a lot going on in the world that us as a people need to take notice and look at," Butler said. "You hope that with all these things going on, people's mindset and mentality would change…You can't overutilize your authority. It's a certain way you've got to go about things, and it seems like in the last couple of instances, it's been abused."

Howard Beck covers the NBA for Bleacher Report and is a co-host of NBA Sunday Tip, 9-11 a.m. ET on SiriusXM Bleacher Report Radio. Follow him on Twitter, @HowardBeck.