History Tells Us Las Vegas ‘Spades’ Is A Bad Idea For An NBA Team Name

There are bad ideas, there are terrible ideas, and then there are ideas so aggressively, almost artistically misguided that you have to wonder if someone in the room actively hates Black people—or at the very least assumes we won’t notice. 

Social media has actually been floating the idea of calling the possible NBA expansion team in Las Vegas the…..wait for it….”Spades.”

Fam! Fam, again!

This is why Black folks have been raging against the destruction of Black History at the hands of the Grand Wizard-in-chief. Because the next thing you know, you’re going to look up and the Houston Rockets will be playing the Las Vegas Sambos. 

Seriously. Even kicking around the idea of calling the Vegas team the “Spades” isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s Tone-Loc. 

Like, are ya’ll good?

I’m not going to hold your hand when I tell you that a “spade” isn’t just a card suit (As I know some users thought it would be cute to call the NBA team the “Spades” since the WNBA team is the “Aces”). The word has a long, ugly history as a racial slur aimed at Black people. Not “kind of problematic.” Not “depending on context.” We’re talking about a term that has been used explicitly and repeatedly to demean, dehumanize, and flatten Black folks into a caricature. The kind of language that lived comfortably alongside segregation signs and Jim Crow punchlines.

And this is why Black History matters. The term “Spade” as a racial slur goes all the way back to early 20th-century Europe and the U.S., tied to the black suit in playing cards and weaponized as shorthand for Blackness itself. It gained traction in American vernacular during a time when racism wasn’t coded—it was casual, explicit, and socially acceptable. It sat in the same linguistic junk drawer as other slurs we all agree are radioactive. The difference is that “spade,” for whatever reason, sometimes slips through conversations with a shrug, as if history just…expired.

It didn’t.

So when you suggest naming a basketball team—a league where roughly 70–75% of players are Black—“the Spades,” you’re not being edgy. You’re not being clever. You are, at best, revealing a stunning ignorance of history. 

And let’s talk about the optics for a second. The NBA is a global league, one that has spent decades carefully crafting an image of cultural relevance, social awareness, and player empowerment. This is the same league that stood behind players speaking out after the murder of George Floyd, that put “Black Lives Matter” on courts, and that has positioned itself as the “woke” league compared to its peers.

Now imagine all of that credibility getting body-slammed by a franchise rollout that sounds like it came from a 1950s country club.

“Welcome your newest team: the Las Vegas Spades!”

What would the Spades halftime show look like? Don’t answer that. 

We need to bring back public shaming. We need to look into dunce hats and how much they cost with shipping. There needs to be a way to collectively bring those who pull these kinds of stunts on social media, acts that actually gain traction because no one stops to realize just how ignorant they’re being, to the front of the class and told that they have just lost their recess privileges. 

Words don’t exist in a vacuum, especially in America, where language has always been one of racism’s favorite tools (It’s the hammer in case you were wondering). But one doesn’t accidentally land on a term with that kind of baggage unless they’re trying to be funny. I love a good off-colored joke, but there has to be a line. 

That’s the real indictment here; it’s not just the idea but the process that allowed it to breathe. Something like this made it into public conversation, and it didn’t just stay on social media; reputable sports sites like Bleacher Report actually included it in a list of possible names to consider. 

That’s how I know we aren’t in the rooms where we need to be, because if even one Black person with a functioning memory of American history had real power in that discussion, this idea would have been shut down faster than a group chat when somebody accidentally texts “WTF? You buggin’” to their boss.

This is what happens when organizations treat diversity as a brochure photo instead of a decision-making necessity. You get blind spots big enough to drive a team bus through.

The collective Black “We” will tell you when we are past certain words, and as of today, we aren’t past any of them. Hell, I still have a problem taking the cotton out of the aspirin bottle. Because we are sensitive about our history and how it gets played with, especially during Orange Crock Pot, or whatever that guy’s name was that oversaw the Cambodian genocide. 

It’s exhausting. It’s predictable. And frankly, it’s embarrassing.

Because here’s the truth: naming a team is not that hard. You have an entire universe of options—animals, weather phenomena, abstract concepts, local culture, history that doesn’t double as a slur. You are in Las Vegas, a city built on spectacle. You could be the Roulettes, the High Rollers, the Mirage, the Neon, the “Why Does Marcus Smart Keep Killing My Parlays?” —literally anything that doesn’t require a historical disclaimer.

And yet, somehow, “Spades” made the shortlist.

At a certain point, we have to start calling it what it is: a failure to care enough to get it right. Because the information is not hidden. The history is not obscure. A five-second search—or a five-second conversation with the right person—would have been enough.

Instead, we’re here, once again, having to explain why a word that has been used to demean Black people for generations might not be the best choice for a billion-dollar sports franchise.

America doesn’t just have a race problem. It has a memory problem. And every time something like this happens, it’s a reminder that for all the progress we love to congratulate ourselves on, there are still rooms where nobody knows—or worse, nobody cares—what these words carry.

Naming a team “the Spades” wouldn’t just be bad branding. It would be a neon-lit admission that, even now, we’re still capable of being spectacularly, willfully stupid. 

And honestly? That might be the most on-brand thing about it.

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