NBA star Chris Paul speaks about 2020 NBA season, social justice, and politics

NBA All-Star Chris Paul speaks to Yahoo Finance's Dan Roberts to discuss all things basketball during the coronavirus pandemic, including the Bubble, social justice activism, and his future goals.

Video Transcript

- Chris Paul is the National Basketball Players Association President. The Oklahoma City Thunder's point guard is a 10-time All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist. Paul's business endeavors include his Oh Dipp!!! Productions, and he's a founding partner in Players TV, the athlete-owned media network. He's co-chair of When We All Vote-- a nonpartisan organization to increase voter participation and a strong supporter of historically black colleges and universities.

DAN ROBERTS: OK, welcome back to the "All Market Summit." I'm Dan Roberts. We're delighted to have Chris Paul here today. Chris, thanks for joining me.

CHRIS PAUL: Thanks for having me, Dan. I really appreciate it.

DAN ROBERTS: So let's start with your business endeavors off the court. You're an investor in Players TV. You've got your own production company, Oh Dipp!!! Productions. And I know that just recently you guys signed a deal with a company that is part of MGM. So I guess I'd ask what kind of content do you want to create? What are you aiming to get out there?

CHRIS PAUL: I think Oh Dipp!!! is a storytelling platform, right? The fact that I've been in professional sports and involved in so many different entities for so many different years, we just want the ability to be able to tell stories, you know, in a unique, fun way. We have some scripted, some unscripted projects that we've been working on. And I'm excited.

We got a project called American Soul about sort of the underground sneaker-- sneaker market. We have an HBCU project coming up. A real really cool project is called The Data Supports This Deal, which is about-- it starts with that game back in March when our situation happened with the Utah Jazz.

DAN ROBERTS: Absolutely. And I want to ask you while we have you, what is it about athletes and media right now? I mean, if you look around, so many pro athletes have gotten into media, whether, you know, Kobe had started a media investing fund. LeBron, obviously, has a bunch going on with TV deals.

Derek Jeter started the Players Tribune. And it's funny for us in the media because now you've got athletes really just telling their stories directly. And in many ways, they cut out the media. And I just wonder what the appeal is there for you. Why media now?

CHRIS PAUL: I think the appeal is that athletes finally realize-- like, all of us realize that who can tell our stories better than us, right? Like, we're a part of it. We see it firsthand day in and day out. And, you know, to be an athlete is a lot of work. It's more than just throwing a pass or shooting a ball. There's is a lot of discipline and a lot of thought that goes into it.

So it's been the funnest thing for me over the past I don't know how many years. I've always been interested in my business. So why not share that with the next generation and create along the way?

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, along those same lines, you know, I cover sports business. So I'm often covering what athletes are doing in terms of endorsement deals. Obviously, we see you on TV all the time in the State Farm ads. But along the same lines with what you're doing in media, it seems to me like in the last few years that the model for athletes has kind of shifted.

You know, you still endorse products. You might appear in ads. But a lot more athletes are investing in startups to get equity. Do you think kind of that the Model here for athletes and business off the court or off the field has changed?

CHRIS PAUL: It changed drastically, drastically. And I'm so fortunate that I played for a long time, right? So 15 years. And there was once upon a time where you come into the NBA and they're like, here, will you hold this, and smile, and we'll pay you something for it. But, you know, athletes-- everyone are so much more in tune now and understand that you want to be a part of something that you really believe in, and you want to do equity deals.

You want to have opportunity to grow with the business that you're building. And, you know, luckily for me, you'll never see me partner or endorse anything that I don't really and truly believe in. And I think that's easily the way that everything's going.

DAN ROBERTS: Another big role of yours-- kind of off the court but also on the court-- President of the NBA Players Association. Now, you've been in that role since 2013. But obviously this year was unlike any other. I mean, with everything going on, not just the pandemic and playing in a bubble but pushing the league to really promote social justice. Tell me about the leadership challenges you faced as president of the NBPA this year.

CHRIS PAUL: Yeah. I don't know if challenges, experiences-- whatever word you want to use-- it's been unbelievable. I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about our league. And I think the biggest thing that we learned is how-- how strong we can be when we come together, right? It's always been bigger in the game. But these times that we're all enduring and going through, we got to go through it together. And we're learning. We're becoming more educated, and it doesn't stop.

Like, the bubble was thankfully a success. But now it's, you know, we got to do more. And this voting cycle and everything that's going on as far as the election has been a way for us to not only educate ourselves but educate our audience.

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, you mentioned that the voting cycle. You are a co-founder of When We All Vote. And then just about a month ago you did an event in North Carolina with Joe Biden. You FaceTimed in to Steph Curry. And it's interesting. I wanted to ask you if you think that athletes have sort of embraced promoting their own politics more than ever before? Or, of course, some people say, look, you know, sports was always political. I mean, is this a new shift?

CHRIS PAUL: I think sports have always been political. Athletes have just chosen to do so, you know, when they felt comfortable. I think from me and Steph-- we talk about it at times being parents, right? It's more than just about me, you know.

I feel responsible for the things that my kids will see and what they'll endure. So that was a choice of mine, you know, and everyone may not agree with it. But that is OK. That is perfectly fine, you know. But for me, it was-- it was a big decision. And I was excited to go to my home state of North Carolina to do that.

DAN ROBERTS: You mentioned HBCUs earlier, Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

CHRIS PAUL: Yes, sir.

DAN ROBERTS: You really used your time in the bubble to promote them, to bring attention to them. And I guess I'd ask you, you know, how do you think that went? You know, whether you you've seen an impact from that already? And then how do you continue the momentum moving forward?

CHRIS PAUL: Well, the impact has been amazing, amazing. And my passion for HBCUs comes from every one in my family attending. And I'm not sure if you even know them, but I'm actually in school right now. I attend Winston-Salem State University, hoping to get my degree soon at some point.

But I think it went great, and it just raised awareness. It's the awareness. I think for a lot of time HBCUs have almost looked, you know, inferior to the blue bloods and all of these big schools. But people are finally starting to see that, you know, these schools are just as productive. They just lack the proper funding.

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, it's so interesting. And, you know, you talk about bringing attention to something. Let's talk about the social justice element too with the phrases and the names on the jerseys.

You know, I saw a story saying that most likely next NBA season you won't see those return. So I'd want to ask how do you keep the momentum going there, and you did say earlier, you know, we have to do more. So what do you see happening down the line in terms of the league and the players kind of keeping this commitment strong to bringing attention to these issues beyond just this moment where it all kind of came to the fore?

CHRIS PAUL: Yeah, I think it'll be a conversation, right? When we had that sort of reset pause or shut down where we were in the bubble, we sort of talked about this social justice coalition that we formed so that we can be more proactive when things occur. The good thing about the league is that every decision isn't just mine, and we have a wide variety of very smart players. But these are discussions that we'll have so that we make sure that we continue to play the game that we love but make sure that we continue to show people who we are, right? And I just want to give you this quick example of I don't know if you remember that game in the bubble with Jamal Murray and the Denver Nuggets.

DAN ROBERTS: Oh, yeah.

CHRIS PAUL: And I think what it all-- I always remember that game and his speech after the game. Because had we not gone to the bubble, you still would have probably heard from LeBron James, Kevin Durant-- all these different guys, right, these stars in our league. But I think because we were there and as emotional as Jamal was, people know who he is as a person now more than just who he is as a basketball player.

DAN ROBERTS: That's absolutely true. Absolutely. I mean, there's the breakout performance on the court, and then there's everything off the court. You mentioned LeBron. You know, it's interesting-- and I know this as someone who covers sports business-- right now there's still a very loud vocal corner on the internet of people kind of screaming the NBA got political. They always mention LeBron. They say LeBron, you know, social justice. And they're complaining about it. They say it's got, you know, politics are involved now.

And it's interesting. You know, one of our other speakers today at the summit is Emmanuel Acho, the former NFL player. And in a recent interview he said, you know, social justice, and police brutality, and life and death are not politics. It's not political. What do you say to all the people out there who are just claiming that, you know, the NBA got woke and political? What are they missing?

CHRIS PAUL: What would I say to them? I think it's just a right and wrong thing. You can call it political or not political. I think all of us looked at it as being humans, right? Just being good people.

And for us, we wanted to speak on the things that we face day in and day out. I say this all the time. When people watch our games, as exciting as it is and we send you on this emotional roller coaster and it's these last second shots, when the game is over we do not walk out of the arena in our uniforms, right? We don't.

We get dressed. We get in the car. I go home as a black man, right, with my family. And so the things that we face on a daily basis just because we play in the NBA doesn't make us that much different from our homies that's back home or the people that we grew up with. So the things that we speak on, the things that we talk about are things that are, you know, daily reminders that, you know, yes, playing basketball, football, soccer-- whatever it is-- our job, but it's not who we are.

DAN ROBERTS: We talked about the bubble and how it was such a success in many ways. I'd be curious, especially as President of the NBPA, what you heard in the last couple of weeks, you know, since things wrapped up from other players on how it went? What has the reaction from them on kind of just the big picture for this very different 2020 NBA season?

CHRIS PAUL: For me, I got a chance to see it all, right? So I got to see the very beginning stages of, you know, players very unsure as I was, you know. There's a lot of conversations to be had. Everyone was scared, nervous not knowing what that was going to look like. And to see how grateful everyone has been, right, not to me but to each other-- just the fact that not only did we get an opportunity to play, and use an unbelievable platform, and raise awareness, but we got a chance to really have conversations with each other. We got a chance to teach each other.

I am, you know, smarter and more aware of situations that I wasn't as aware of before I went to the bubble. Because a lot of times over the course of a season we just cross each other in passing. There's no real, you know, how are you? Like, how are you mentally? Like, how are you dealing with this? And in the bubble we were forced to have those conversations.

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, that's excellent. That's excellent. It kind of seems like maybe people look back on it and instead of being this anomaly year that was kind of weird, it was actually really significant and kind of moves a lot of things forward, not just for the NBA, but really for sports.

CHRIS PAUL: No question. No question. I mean, I had an opportunity to talk to a lot of the black players that played Major League Soccer, right? I would have never had that opportunity. I had baseball players that reached out, football players that reached out, the WNBA.

We did a call with the NBA and WNBA players with Michelle Obama. That is unheard of. So as tough as things were as far as us being away from our families, I absolutely believe that the things that took place during this pandemic will definitely move sports forward.

DAN ROBERTS: I'm so glad you mentioned some of the other leagues because I was going to ask, you know, whether it's what they do on social justice and politics or whether it's what they've done in business off the court or off the field. I always like to ask pro athletes who are some of the other athletes that you look to for influence as role models in terms of their decisions, either in your sport or outside your sport?

CHRIS PAUL: Yeah. There's a number of guys obviously that I know in other leagues. Mookie Betts is a really good friend of mine who plays for the Dodgers. We share a bowling interest, but he's just a great, great person, right? But I think what our league has always been really good about and it's one of those things you know. But then when something happens, you're like, whoa, like, people really do pay attention to us. And it was when we sort of took that reset-- when we had to take that pause and really, really gather our thoughts to see the amount of calls that I was getting from the other leagues.

I'm usually not surprised by too much, but I was really surprised. And as I was telling our players, I was like, look man, we have an unbelievable job, a role here to play. Because everyone sort of follows our lead. And so on it's really a special time to be connected with all the other leagues like we are.

DAN ROBERTS: It's a great segue. I wanted to ask you big picture if we zoom out, what is the role of the NBA in American culture or really globally now moving forward?

CHRIS PAUL: That's a great question, and I might not be the one equipped to answer it. But I think what we do is we're in it, right? We don't think that deep into it. We sort of just talk it out amongst each other, try to collect our thoughts, see what we envision of ourselves, right?

And I think that's the thing that we always take into consideration. It's not just how we view ourselves. But a lot of us are fathers, husbands-- you know, kids and stuff. And we always make sure that we want to project the right thing to kids. And as long as they understand that they have a voice-- like, for us, we had a chance to grow up and see the Cleveland Summit with the Jim Browns, the Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, all these guys, you know. So hopefully, hopefully we're an inspiration to kids out there who say, look, you know, I do love this sport, but I want to be who I am.

DAN ROBERTS: Chris, let's end on this. What is the big picture dream for you professionally beyond basketball?

CHRIS PAUL: Man, that is a great question. I'm sure my team and everyone who works with me and helps me would love to know that answer. I would love to be eventually a governor of an NBA franchise. Obviously, I love the game. Like, I love the game, and I want to be a part of it for a very long time and just continue to grow our business, Oh Dipp!!!-- continue to tell these great stories.

I'm an investor in Players TV, which is an unbelievable distribution platform. And I'm excited about what other athletes. And it goes back to what you said in the beginning is that athletes are realizing that we're more than just the product, right? We can be involved in the decision making and everything like that it goes forward. So I want to continue to build these brands and businesses and enjoy my family.

DAN ROBERTS: Awesome. Well, wishing you all the best. Chris, I love what you're doing. Thanks so much for joining us.

CHRIS PAUL: Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it.