Here’s the Boston Globe reporting on the National Basketball Players Association and their recent news:
History was quietly made this week by an organization that desperately needs positive publicity, with Michele Roberts working feverishly to ensure the NBA Players Association improves its reputation.
Roberts was named the first women to lead a men’s professional sports union last week after the NBPA went more than a year without an executive director. Countless times over the past six months, commissioner Adam Silver referred to the players’ lack of leadership as a reason major issues were being tabled.
Roberts was elected by 32 of the 36 player representatives, making her a barrier-breaker and also a neophyte in what has been a contentious relationship over the past several years. The NBA has sustained two major work stoppages over the past 16 years, including a 66-game lockout-marred season in 2011-12.
With those issues on her mind, Roberts said she hasn’t had time to reflect on her groundbreaking position. And she won’t. She said she’ll be too busy preparing herself for the task of representing the league’s players entering a critical financial phase in which salaries could rise significantly with a new television contract.
“I have continued professionally to reinvent myself,” said Roberts, who is a Washington-based lawyer in the firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom. “At one point I thought I was going to die a criminal defense attorney. And I haven’t done any criminal work in 10 years. I cannot recall being this excited in my life as I am right now. I quite frankly wish I could start tomorrow.”
