I don't know anything about /r/nba but from observations of other subs it seems just as likely that a few mods had a private discussion and said "Should we allow this?" and decided no, and then just went ahead and tried to enforce that. Once they've come to decision to not allow something they're not going to let it pass just because a lot of people are reposting it. If you give up after deleting the first 100 threads it makes you look pretty stupid.
On /r/soccer what's happened a few times is some story will come up like the one you mentioned, every single thread on the topic is deleted and then a day or so later there will be some announcement they had another discussion and have changed their mind so will allow one or more threads to be posted. There was a similar thing on /r/worldnews a few years ago when there was a spate of sexual assaults in Cologne at a Christmas/New Year parade. Initially all threads on this were removed on the grounds this wasn't really world news, but since it made the front page of many international papers was the main story on the BBC, etc - that initial judgement looked pretty stupid and threads were allowed.
I mean, it could be "kickbacks" driving this thing but honestly a lot of it is easy to explain without recourse to that. It's still arbitrary but not necessarily corrupt.
On /r/soccer what's happened a few times is some story will come up like the one you mentioned, every single thread on the topic is deleted and then a day or so later there will be some announcement they had another discussion and have changed their mind so will allow one or more threads to be posted. There was a similar thing on /r/worldnews a few years ago when there was a spate of sexual assaults in Cologne at a Christmas/New Year parade. Initially all threads on this were removed on the grounds this wasn't really world news, but since it made the front page of many international papers was the main story on the BBC, etc - that initial judgement looked pretty stupid and threads were allowed.
I mean, it could be "kickbacks" driving this thing but honestly a lot of it is easy to explain without recourse to that. It's still arbitrary but not necessarily corrupt.