Los Angeles (AFP)

The NBA said on Wednesday that all teams must play the U.S. national anthem before every game, after Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban confirmed he had asked his team to stop playing.

"With the NBA teams now in the process of welcoming fans back to their precincts, all teams will play the national anthem in accordance with long-standing championship policy," said Mike Bass, chief executive officer. communication from the NBA, in a press release.

Since the start of the NBA season, the Dallas Mavericks had stopped sounding the anthem before matches in their room, following a decision by owner Mark Cuban, confirmed by the latter on ESPN.

None of the 13 games, including the preseason, that have been played at the American Airlines Center since mid-December has been preceded by the short “Star Spangled Banner” ceremonial.

A first in American professional basketball, which took two months to be noticed.

It was during the reception of the Minnesota Timberwolves on Monday, the first game played in the presence of a limited number of spectators, that the media outlet The Athletic inquired about this "absence", the Mavericks never having communicated on the question.

The case was brought up to the White House.

When asked about the matter, presidential spokeswoman Jean Psaki stressed that Joe Biden had "great respect for the anthem and all that it stands for, especially for our men and women who serve in uniform in the whole world".

- Knee on the ground -

She nevertheless acknowledged that the times when the American anthem was broadcast were a means of expression for sportsmen, whose "rights to demonstrate peacefully are guaranteed by the Constitution".

Mark Cuban had spoken in favor of the kneeling of his players wanting to show their support for the fight against racial injustice in the wake of the George Floyd affair, this black man who died of suffocation after his arrest in Minneapolis at the end of May.

"If they kneel down, and if they're respectful, I'll be proud of them. Hopefully, I'll join them," he said.

"If you want to complain, go to your boss and ask him why they don't play the national anthem every day before you start working," he had tweeted again for Internet users who would be shocked.

The knee on the ground, posed on a very large part of the grounds of basketball, football, hockey, baseball last year, was a source of anger for the former president Donald Trump, who had called "son of a bitch" Colin Kaepernick , initiator of this movement in 2016, and other professional sportsmen who made this gesture considered unpatriotic, including during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year.

In 2017, all major professional sports championships introduced the pre-game anthem, including the pre-race NASCAR car anthem.

In 2020, the North American football league had not done so during its resumption tournament in Orlando, the matches taking place behind closed doors.

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