An unarmed black man is killed by a cop in the Twin Cities. Sometime thereafter, professional basketball is played. Before one game, the reigning league champions take the court for warmups in T-shirts that read ‘Change Starts with Us’. Before two others, a trio of former league MVPs across three teams lead similar rallies clad in ‘Black Lives Matter’ tees; when those three teams and their players draw fines for violating the league’s dress code, two of those MVPs agree to hold their team’s post-game news conferences jointly and tell the media: “We’re only talking about Black Lives Matter”. Across the league, players post pictures of themselves in protest shirts on their social media feeds with messages underneath crying out for justice and reform. By the end of the month, the fines are rescinded.

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The preceding description isn’t some fever vision of the conflicts to come if indeed the NBA does come back from its coronavirus-imposed hibernation this summer. It’s flashback to a line in the sand that was drawn some four years ago, following the murder of Minneapolis’s Philando Castile, by the players of the WNBA – old hands when it comes to leveraging their platform for the bigger topics of the day. The ‘Change Starts with Us’ tees? Those came from the Minnesota Lynx, whose passive support for Castile and Alton Sterling (killed by Baton Rouge cops a day prior to Castile’s death) prompted four off-duty cops who work Lynx games to desert their security posts. Never mind that the empathy the women also expressed at that press conference for the five police officers who were gunned down at a protest in Dallas after Castile’s death.

The MVPs in those Black Lives Matter tees? Why, they were none other than Phoenix Mercury combo goddess Diana Taurasi, the bruising New York Liberty pivot Tina Charles and the unrelenting Indiana Fever slasher Tamika Catchings – the last two of whom organized that joint presser when their teams met at Madison Square Garden, the Mecca of basketball. And while there’s an argument to be made that tees-and-tweet protests were a burgeoning fad at that time – with LeBron James and Cleveland Browns receiver Andrew Hawkins leading early trendsetters – only in the WNBA does the spirit of civic engagement suffuse the sport itself.

The deaths of Castile and Sterling were hardly the last case studies to trigger pointed reactions from the league. As Colin Kaepernick was taking arrows for genuflecting during the national anthem in 2016, players from the Fever and the Mercury locked arms and took a knee on court before their game in solidarity. A year later, when the president dismissed NFL protesters as sons of bitches and called on team owners to fire any one of them who dIsReSpEcTeD tHe FlAg, the Lynx knelt and linked arms during the anthem again while their opponent, the Los Angeles Sparks, walked off the court entirely. The kicker: this was before Game 1 of the WNBA finals.

Two years ago, when downtown Washington DC became the site for a sequel to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that had culminated in the hit-and-run death of resister Heather Heyer, the Washington Mystics, playing host to the Sparks just a few blocks away, refused to let the moment pass without a formal rebuke. (“We feel shock at the state of this country and believe that hate should never be granted this platform,” All-Star guard Kristi Toliver said over the PA system before the anthem ceremony.) Early last year, Lynx forward Maya Moore – a league MVP, two-time Olympic gold medalist and four-time champion on the fast track to GOAT status – announced an extended leave from basketball to focus on criminal justice reform. As modern-day sacrifices for the greater good come in sport, only Kaepernick’s ranks higher. “You never want to see anyone disrespect anything that stands for honor,” Moore told ESPN in response to Drew Brees’s initially tone-deaf critique of flag protests, “but the other half is (…) this symbol of bravery and freedom in American means that for a portion of the population there are so many, namely black and brown bodies, in America who have experienced a different America.”

It isn’t just WNBA players who take a stand. Four years after issuing fines to dress code rebels, the league now bakes activism into its ticket sales, encouraging buyers to direct a segment of their outlay to breast cancer vigilance, sexual assault prevention and educational support for LGBTQ+ youth. The Seattle Storm fundraises for Planned Parenthood unabashedly.

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Even now as corporations and governments hop on the bandwagon to make this Friday an official holiday for Juneteenth (the declarative moment meant to finish the job the Emancipation Proclamation started), as the president gears up for a comeback rally at the site of one of the worst acts of racial terrorism in this country’s too-appalling history, the Liberty already had their own Juneteenth observance planned for Friday afternoon. Their event, a virtual town hall, tips off at 3pm ET and will be moderated by Breakfast Club host Angela Yee and include Liberty guard Layshia Clarendon, Brooklyn Nets swingman Garrett Temple, activist Topeka K Sam and the Grammy-nominated emcee Rapsody as panelists. To hear team COO Keia Clarke tell it, the Liberty’s celebration – inspired by the annual Juneteenth festival held at the team’s adopted home in White Plains, New York – was too important to wait for the WNBA’s tentative July return, at which point it’ll be sharing its somewhat exclusive summer spotlight with all the sports Covid wiped out in the spring. “It’s a much-needed conversation at this time,” she says.

How does an entire basketball league come to share this sense of urgency around social issues? Well, it could be that women’s sports itself remains somewhat of an act of protest, even after the passing of Title IX. The WNBA has been fighting for respect from its inception almost a quarter century ago. The intrinsic economic biases against the sport means that players wind up staying in college all four years and playing internationally during the WNBA offseason to supplement their professional incomes. Altogether, it makes for an educated and worldly group of athletes who are far less insulated from systemic inequities than their exponentially higher earning male counterparts.

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So it figures that when these women weren’t reckoning with gay rights or police brutality or other weighty obstacles of the day, über-talented Aussie center Liz Cambage and other league stars were openly challenging their employers to raise their wages so they don’t have to dribble for cash overseas during the WNBA offseason. Earlier this year, they won a new CBA that – in addition to pay hikes, modest though they were – yields important ground on maternity leave and mental healthcare. What’s more, racial inequality never becomes core to the league’s activist mission if Catchings, Las Vegas’ Tanisha Wright and other black players don’t point out the hypocrisy of the league fining them for wearing Black Lives Matter tees while encouraging on-court shows of support for victims of 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando.

In the last few weeks, the NBA’s seemingly inexorable march toward an end-of-July return in the Magic Kingdom has run into surprise headwinds from Kyrie Irving, Dwight Howard and a minority of star players who wonder if a resumption of play might distract from the more important social work that’s happening around the world. Rather than concede the spotlight, especially without making a single demand, they’d be wise to take a page from the women of the WNBA playbook, now campaigning to have Black Lives Matter branded onto the court. Not only have they shown that the fraught journey to institutional transformation has many paths, they’ve proven that success on this quest only comes through using their dizzyingly lofty basketball platform as an unrelenting bully pulpit to speak truth to power and inspire the activist who might be on the fence about whether to tuck into some hoops or hit the streets.