He didn't do what he was "supposed to do". He boycotted, or whatever the labor term would be for an army recruit.

Under capitalism you have your leverage when you withhold your labor and value, not when you give it and then ask for something afterwards. All your leverage is gone.

The NBA players are workers and they are withholding their labor and surplus value because of racial injustice.

And they have powerfully forced everyone in the league's hand.

It is way more powerful than just speaking out after doing what you're supposed to do (in their case, playing bball and winning games).

Lebron James has been bravely speaking out since at least the Michael Brown murder, IIRC. Yesterday James achieved more in one night than years of his press conferences have.

This passage is what I'm getting at:

"Here I just want to make a sim­ple point: these NBA play­ers may be rich and famous, but in this case, they are not doing any­thing that you can’t do too. The pow­er they are exer­cis­ing here is not ath­let­ic pow­er, but labor pow­er. They are mem­bers of a union, the Nation­al Bas­ket­ball Play­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, and that union has a con­tract with the NBA, and that con­tract pro­hibits them from strik­ing. Yet they struck. And not only did they get away with it, but it was a spec­tac­u­lar pub­lic suc­cess. They pulled off a wild­cat strike because they have lever­age. Because they can. That is the only pow­er that real­ly mat­ters in the work­place. Every­thing else is imag­i­nary.

Think about it: What would hap­pen if the NBA start­ed wav­ing its con­tract, with the ​“no strike” clause, and crit­i­ciz­ing the play­ers for their work stop­page, and threat­en­ing harsh legal retal­i­a­tion? The NBA would be crushed by a wave of bad PR, first of all. That would be bad for busi­ness. And what would be worse for busi­ness would be the fact that there would be no busi­ness — if the play­ers don’t play, there is no NBA. Peri­od...

...The rules that gov­ern orga­nized labor in Amer­i­ca are not fair. The bulk of labor law has been writ­ten to favor busi­ness, which has the mon­ey and finan­cial incen­tive to spend decades lob­by­ing to make labor laws more and more hos­tile to work­ers. The law harsh­ly restricts who is allowed to union­ize, and what rights they have, and when they are legal­ly allowed to strike.

//// especially this part.... /////

***** The Mil­wau­kee Bucks have per­formed the valu­able ser­vice of show­ing us that all of those laws don’t mean jack shit. Lever­age is time­less and sits out­side the law. It is root­ed in the fab­ric of real­i­ty, like physics. Why did the NBA rush to release state­ments about how it ​“sup­ports” these unau­tho­rized strikes which very well may end their sea­son? In what sense do the own­ers of these teams ​“sup­port” these actions, which may cost them mil­lions of dol­lars, that they would have warned against right up until the moment they hap­pened? They ​“sup­port” the play­ers here in the sense that they have no choice but to do so. What would hap­pen if the NBA respond­ed to these unau­tho­rized strikes by lock­ing the play­ers out next sea­son, as would be their right under the con­tract? Would all of the world’s NBA fans sit calm­ly and con­tin­ue tithing mon­ey to bas­ket­ball team own­ers in order to pre­serve the sanc­ti­ty of con­tracts? No. What would hap­pen is there would be no NBA.

And if all of the play­ers got sick of the own­ers and their con­tracts and decid­ed to pack up and start their own bas­ket­ball league that they them­selves ran, fans would watch that, because that is where the good bas­ket­ball would be. The play­ers make mon­ey for the own­ers, not vice ver­sa. This is the key to their lever­age. With an under­stand­ing of this fact, their options are lim­it­less. The league can holler and yell and cajole and object, but ulti­mate­ly it will come along. The work­ers have the pow­er." *****

https://inthesetimes.com/article/nba-strike-bucks-basketball-labor-union