The Ray Rice video changed everything.
TMZ released the video of the then-NFL running back dragging his then-fiancée, now-wife Janay Palmer out of an Atlantic City casino elevator in February 2014. The Baltimore Ravens, who employed Rice, called it a “serious matter,” and the league eventually suspended Rice for two games in July of the same year.
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In September 2014, TMZ released a longer version of the video, which contained the escalation of the fight between the couple inside the elevator, with Rice punching Palmer in the face. The Associated Press obtained a longer version of the video, with audio, from a law-enforcement source. That video revealed that hotel staff told Rice, “She’s drunk, right?” as well as saying, “No cops.” On the same day as the videos and the extra reporting surfaced, the Ravens released Rice. He never played in the NFL again, and he and the team reached a settlement on his wrongful termination claim a few months later. Rice has gone on to speak out against domestic violence, and how his decisions cost him his career, even if he got some of the money he initially lost out on back from his old team.
In real-time, you could feel things change. Teams that have signed or hired athletes, coaches and executives with domestic violence charges in their pasts have faced more rigorous questions about those decisions. Leagues developed or re-codified their policies on domestic violence. (Although, some of that has meant the leagues in question forgoing immediate punishment, saying they cannot issue any penalties until legal proceedings have played out.) Penalties, in general, got harsher, although very often not as harsh as those for, say, using banned substances. Everything became more scrutinized, and that scrutiny necessitated leagues and teams to come up with standardized responses.
That reality has produced positive and negative results. It feels as if we reached a new frontier within this realm on Tuesday when the Houston Rockets traded Kevin Porter Jr., who was arrested for an alleged attack on former girlfriend Kysre Gondrezick last month in New York, along with two future second-round picks to the Oklahoma City Thunder in exchange for the injured Victor Oladipo and Jeremiah Robinson-Earl. The Thunder will immediately waive Porter. Porter faces charges of second-degree strangulation and third-degree assault. He has pleaded not guilty. Manhattan prosecutors dropped another assault charge on Monday. On Tuesday, Gondrezick, who said she is no longer dating Porter, denied the allegations that Porter beat and choked her in comments to the New York Post.
The motivations for the trade: Houston gets off of a public relations headache and saves more than $4 million, the difference between the guaranteed portion of Porter’s four-year contract and the salaries of the two incoming players. The Rockets could also have legitimate interest in Robinson-Earl, who has shown flashes of being a useful player in his first two seasons and is under contract for two more. Additionally, by acquiring a player for Porter instead of just waiving him, they can now throw that player — Oladipo — in a trade later in the season. In return, not only do the Thunder clear some room on a roster that featured more players than the team could retain once the regular season begins, but they add two second-round picks. The Thunder now have 10 future first-round picks and 18 future second-round picks from other teams to use for themselves or dangle in trade talks. It is the largest such stockpile in the league.
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It is gross.
Both the Thunder and Rockets are wrong here, but only because the nature of competitive professional sports incentivizes them to act this way. We are used to the concept of players with “bad” contracts. Those are situations in which a team’s financial commitment to a player is far greater than the on-court production he is providing. That could be because of the player’s injury or poor performance or lack of motivation or several other possible factors.
This is sad confirmation that “domestic violence charges” are on that list.
The useful thing about the Rice/Palmer video from nearly a decade ago is it made society, and sports fans in particular, humanize what previously felt like just another blurb scrolling along the bottom of your television. We saw and absorbed what “domestic violence” or “dispute between partners” or “heated altercation” meant. That did not mean we necessarily had to develop feelings about the Rice story, or any similar ones — everyone handles having to confront ugliness and violence differently — but it was very difficult to not acknowledge the truth of them. You had to go out of your way to avoid the topic, as well as the obvious impact these incidents had on the victims.
This trade does a version of the opposite. It commodifies domestic violence in the parlance of NBA contracts. Horrible behavior becomes salary cap maneuvering. Agreeing to pay the remainder of Porter’s contract is worth a vaguely intriguing prospect and two second-round picks. Porter might as well have torn his Achilles tendon for the purposes of this trade. Same upshot, more or less. Both teams took the reality of the situation and used it to pursue their basketball-specific goals. They lined up their assets and made what they thought was a mutually beneficial trade.
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Again: morally repugnant. Houston was reportedly shopping Porter around the league, attaching picks to Porter to make a potential trade more appetizing to other teams. The likelihood is if the Thunder had not made the trade, another team would have stepped in to make a similar deal work. The Rockets were clear that Porter was not going to play for them again after the incident. Viewing this through a basketball-first lens, they salvaged the contract they gave Porter the best way they could.
It is a mutation of where this all started. In a world before the Rice video surfaced, maybe the punishment for Porter wouldn’t have been so severe. Combine the alleged assault on Gondrezick with Porter’s locker-room outbursts with both the Cavaliers and Rockets, and he would have a difficult time getting a team to sign him after the legal proceedings are finished. (In November 2020, Porter got in a single-car accident, leading to felony gun and misdemeanor driving without a license charges. They were dropped.) Due to the way the sports world has progressed since the Rice video, Porter is facing consequences sooner than he would have otherwise, and they are significant.
It is folding that into the existing transactional landscape of the NBA that is problematic. The ability for a league to punish a player for off-court incidents is collectively bargained. Certainly, the NBA coming in as the ultimate decider would be an issue, too. Ceding total power to commissioners is a good way to lose the plot, and to take away the agency of those involved.
In this instance, allowing two teams to make what amounts to a basketball trade is wrong, too. Maybe the league needs to institute a temporary no-movement clause for players facing legal charges. The issue isn’t so much that the Rockets and the Thunder made the situation work for themselves, but that their ability to do so speeds up the process of forgetting what Porter is alleged to have done. A cynic would suggest that is part of the point in allowing this.
A case of alleged domestic violence should take precedence over NBA asset management and team-building. Business as usual should stop when something as serious as what Porter is alleged to have done occurs. If not, it is just another way of normalizing abhorrent behavior. If not, it is just another way of dehumanizing victims, and unlearning crucial lessons.
GO DEEPER
Barkley presses Silver on recent domestic violence incidents
(Top photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)