Film director Spike Lee sat down with several NBA players and dozens of members of the Everytown Survivor Network to talk about gun violence and how it's affected them. (Everytown for Gun Safety)

Film director Spike Lee sat down with several NBA players and dozens of members of the Everytown Survivor Network to talk about gun violence and how it's affected them. (Everytown for Gun Safety)

In late October, the film director Spike Lee visited the National Basketball Association’s Manhattan headquarters to discuss a bold idea.

He had, for months, wanted to produce a commercial that would denounce gun violence in America. It is perhaps the most polarizing subject in the country, but Lee — who already had ESPN President John Skipper behind the idea — was aiming high: He wanted to include NBA stars and have the support of the league itself.

A few days after the meeting, Lee had Commissioner Adam Silver’s answer: Yes. But that wasn’t all. The NBA would give Lee the freedom to produce and direct the 30-second ad, which the league saw as a public-service announcement, as he saw fit and without censorship. It would feature four NBA players and air five times during ESPN’s Christmas Day broadcast — pro basketball’s equivalent to Super Bowl Sunday.

“He didn’t even ask the owners of the teams,” Lee said in a telephone interview. “He didn’t even ask the owners what they felt. He was like: ‘We’re doing this.’ ”

[Watch the NBA gun violence ad.]

President Obama accepts a Golden State Warriors jersey from team members at a White House ceremony Feb. 4 honoring the 2015 NBA champions. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

Sports leagues joining the public discussion on divisive issues has wilted in the shadow of corporate partnerships, rising revenues and an audience that largely looks at sports as a diversion, not a magnification, of society’s more difficult conversations. But the NBA has in recent years shown a willingness to go where no other league seemingly will: into the political breach.

“The NBA has always led,” Lee said. “It’s hipper and more progressive than other professional sports. I’m not trying to slam anybody; it’s just my opinion. I knew that; that’s why I went to the NBA.”

The league often takes on battleground issues without waiting for universal support from its 30 franchise owners, for talking points to be distributed to teams and players, or to make certain fans — or high-powered sponsors — are not offended.

“There’s no doubt, there’s a segment of our fan base saying: ‘Stick to basketball,’ ” Silver said in an interview. “But sports can play a valuable role in this society in being part of a dialogue, and to me this is how I saw this issue.”

In the past five years, the league has found itself taking sides on a number of volatile topics: a 2011 campaign to curtail the use of homophobic slurs, followed two years later by Jason Collins becoming the first athlete in major American sports to come out as gay; Silver issuing a lifetime ban of former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling in 2014 after he was recorded saying racist remarks; the Miami Heat four years ago wearing hoodies on the court following the death of Trayvon Martin; and, in 2014, superstars Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Derrick Rose wearing shirts during warmups stamped with “I CAN’T BREATHE” after Eric Garner died following a confrontation with the New York City Police Department.

“To use the platform that we have, I think that’s very important,” said Stephen Curry, the NBA’s reigning most valuable player and the first face seen in the league’s gun-violence campaign. “And it just starts the dialogue, hopefully, of how we can make a change.”

This time, it’s not players making a point or a single owner being ousted. It is a $5 billion sports league making a statement (albeit one that stops short of calling for gun regulations or gun control) that, during an election year, is seemingly in lockstep with the White House.

Filmmaker Spike Lee watches as NBA Commissioner Adam Silver addresses a news conference in New York in April 14. (Richard Drew/AP)

“I’m proud of the @NBA for taking a stand against gun violence. Sympathy for victims isn’t enough — change requires all of us speaking up,” President Obama posted on his official Twitter page in late December.

Less than two weeks after ESPN aired Lee’s ad — “We can end gun violence,” Curry’s voice says at the end — Obama entered the East Room at the White House to announce an executive action to reduce gun-related casualties. Two NBA players, the Washington Wizards’ Bradley Beal and Alan Anderson, sat in the first row, and on Thursday when the NBA champion Golden State Warriors visited the White House, Obama saluted players’ willingness to “take a stand against gun violence.”

“I absolutely recognize it’s a political issue. But the fact that it’s a political issue, to me, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a role for the NBA to play,” Silver said. “Whatever people’s positions happen to be on the issue, we can’t be afraid to discuss it.”

‘An important voice’

Last autumn, Lee and Skipper met for breakfast on New York’s Upper East Side. Before taking his idea to the NBA, Lee wanted the blessing of the man who controls the most influential airwaves in sports.

The director had spent the previous few months filming “Chi-Raq,” a satire based in Chicago, where — according to the Chicago Tribune’s “Crime in Chicagoland” database — nearly 3,000 people were shot in 2015. Lee told Skipper about what he had seen and heard in Chicago, the parents and siblings who had lost relatives to gun violence, describing a vision for a public-service campaign in which the NBA’s most famous faces would share their own stories of gun violence, intercut with real-life victims and their families.

Skipper liked it, signing off on a potential series of Christmas Day ads and saying he would make the first call to Silver. Not long after, Lee was at the NBA league office, making his pitch in the first of two meetings with Silver’s top lieutenants. The league saw gun violence not as a political issue but — in particular among African American young men in urban areas, a key demographic in a league whose player roster is nearly 75 percent African American — as a matter of public health, a cousin to the league’s campaigns on mentorship and safe playing spaces for urban youth.

“It frankly speaks directly to those people, particularly those young men in cities who are both the victims and the perpetrators, often, with guns,” Silver said. “They thought we could have an important voice on the issue.”

It happened fast: idea to production within a matter of weeks. League figures, whether in the NBA office or within franchises themselves, had largely stayed out of the gun debate. (A survey conducted by The Washington Post of the political contributions of individuals in the league office, along with NBA players and franchise owners, executives and coaches, revealed no significant involvement with pro- or anti-gun causes or PACs.) Lee and Skipper had just asked, and the NBA said yes.

“To me, that’s revolutionary,” Lee said, “and I don’t think any other league would do that.”

After those meetings at the league office, during which the sides agreed on the ads’ creative approach — scheduling, feasibility and, noticeably, the avoidance of the supercharged topics of gun control and regulations — Lee brought in Everytown for Gun Safety, an anti-gun-violence nonprofit group started by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, to fund the project’s production costs. The organization’s involvement, however, would later give credence to the suggestion the league was calling for more than simply awareness.

“This campaign was never about gun control,” said Jason Rzepka, Everytown’s director of cultural engagement. “It was never about any one solution.”

Four of the NBA’s biggest stars — Curry, who plays for the Warriors, the New York Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony, the Chicago Bulls’ Joakim Noah and the Los Angeles Clippers’ Chris Paul — agreed to appear in the ad.

“It just starts the dialogue, hopefully, of how we can make a change,” Curry said recently on why he agreed to participate. “You can’t bring those [victims] back, so it’s just a matter of raising as much awareness as you can.”

A few minutes before noon on Christmas Day, when the Clippers would tip off against the Miami Heat, the ad aired for the first time. Curry’s voice introduced the topic with an anecdote about his older daughter, 3-year-old Riley, being the same age as a recent shooting victim. “We can end gun violence,” Curry says as a banner for Everytown is shown above logos for the NBA and the league’s players’ association.

Within seconds, league officials monitoring Twitter saw the responses start to pour in.

Mixed reactions

Larry King, the longtime political commentator, tweeted his approval of the NBA’s stance, saying he hoped more leagues join in. Ben McDonald, a former major league pitcher, tweeted that he simply wanted to watch basketball and didn’t “need to hear a political agenda on guns!” A few fans threatened to turn off the day’s games; several said they’d boycott the NBA because, as one viewer saw it, the league “doesn’t like the Constitution.”

Fox News and several conservative blogs condemned the league for its apparent anti-gun stance, though others expressed approval. “It’s a great thing,” said Wizards center Marcin Gortat, who said he owns eight guns. “They have to make stronger procedures to receive a gun, receive a weapon. It doesn’t matter what kind of weapon it is. You’ve just got to make it tougher.”

Silver would spend the following weeks reading — and, in some cases, responding to — emails and letters, often clarifying that the NBA was not calling for gun legislation but instead was standing against violence.

“It’s a third-rail issue in our society,” Silver would say later. “I recognize that.”

The league itself stood by the ad, relieved that — unlike the aftermath of the 2011 ad campaign that called for the end of homophobic language — there had been no protests outside NBA arenas. Silver watched Democratic and Republican presidential debates, seeing even seasoned politicians struggle to find palatable ways to tackle the gun debate. “It’s not an easy one on either side,” he said.

Silver and the league had rung an uncomfortable bell, and in some ways the swift approval of Lee’s project had forced the hands of franchises and players on confronting a sensitive topic. Other than an email to teams announcing the plan to broadcast the ads, one team employee said, there was no instruction on how to proceed. “There wasn’t a lot of directive given for this,” said the team employee, who requested anonymity to discuss the topic freely. “We’re just trying to figure out how to approach this.”

Indeed, when The Post made requests through more than a half-dozen franchises to interview players, a few teams did not respond; others declined to make their players available to discuss the subject. One organization, nearly a month after the ads aired, asked the league office for guidance on how to approach the topic. Another team official ended an interview with a well-known player after learning the discussion was about the NBA’s gun-violence campaign; an employee for another franchise said he wished the issue would simply go away. “A no-win situation,” an employee for another team said. “A lot of times [players] just don’t feel comfortable talking about that stuff.”

Silver, for his part, said he has spent the past month educating himself further on the nuances of a difficult — but, as he sees it, important — discussion. He said he understands some franchises’ discomfort with the timing — “There’s never enough time,” he said — but nonetheless stands by the decision to move forward.

“I accept the point,” Silver said. “And I think even now, here we are roughly a month or more after the public-service announcement aired, and we’re all still learning from it.”

A moment later, he continued.

“My goal is not to convince everyone to do it but to, more importantly, ensure that people are accepting that this is an issue that needs to be discussed,” he said. “And to us, that’s the role we play. I’m still glad we did it.”

Tim Bontemps and Anu Narayanswamy contributed to this report.