As many of you have noticed this week, r/nba has been inaccessible since Monday as a result of joining the ongoing protest against Reddit's upcoming API changes (read more on that below).
Like many other subreddits, r/nba participated in the Reddit blackout following a litmus test of our community. Users responded strongly in favor of blacking out the subreddit.
In the time since the lockout began (and well before that), r/nba mods have been in direct and consistent communication with Reddit's administrative team. The prevailing purpose of these conversations has been to seek enough concessions and assurances from Reddit that we feel confident we can continue to maintain r/nba as an inclusive and accessible community for basketball fans from all walks of life, across the globe.
We believe that we have made enough progress in our conversations with Reddit that we can end the lockout and reopen the subreddit.
Q&A
Why was r/nba locked out?
Beginning on June 12, many of Reddit's largest communities made the difficult decision to close their subreddits as a form of protesting Reddit's upcoming API changes that will effectively make it too expensive for most third party apps to survive.

On top of the significant quality of life/user-experience perks that millions of Reddit users have grown accustomed to on these apps (such as Apollo and Reddit is Fun), some of these apps carry crucial accessibility features that let many members of our community access our subreddit. Several of these apps also feature advanced mod tools that greatly improve the ability of moderators to manage communities of this size.

How was the lockout decision made?
After exhaustive and extensive deliberation within the mod team, we decided the best course of action was to leave the choice to the users of r/nba. This was achieved by crowdsourcing opinions from you over multiple days, including discussion threads and a voting poll that were stickied for multiple days at the top of the sub.

The result was an overwhelming amount of support in favor of a lockout.

Nearly 80% of the 8,000+ voters who participated in our poll were in favor of a lockout, with over 60% of total voters being in favor of an indefinite closure. The renowned Pew Research Center uses samples of 10,000 voters across the United States to determine trends for a population of 350 million. While that isn't the best comparison to our situation (Pew has methods and tools to filter out biases that we don't have access to), we felt like 8,000 votes for a subreddit of our size, combined with the dominant sentiment within comment sections on all related threads, was a strong representation of our subreddit's voice.

For anyone that missed the stickied posts or felt like they were not given a chance to voice their opinions, we duly apologize. We wanted to act in line with what r/nba users wanted and could only work with the response we had at the time.

To browse through some of the discourse that took place in the days prior to the lockout, please refer to high traction threads made by our users here and here, as well as mod announcements here and here (poll).

What did the lockout achieve?
Both prior and during the lockout, members of our mod team have had constant lines of communication with Reddit admins, including direct messaging and the ability to sit in collaborative meetings. We feel those conversations have been productive.

The pressure of the lockout has already resulted in Reddit making concessions as far as accessibility options go. This includes earnestly acknowledging they made a mistake in overlooking accessibility, fast-tracking development of such features on the official app, and most importantly, allowing non-profit third-party accessibility-focused apps to continue operating through the Reddit API for free.

Furthermore, admins have directly assured us that there will be far more clarity going forward with regards to future developments for mod tools and the official app, both with mods across the site and the userbase as a whole. Some of these roadmaps were already shared with us, and while we cannot discuss specific details at this time, we will relay to you whatever information we can when the time comes.

Additionally, and more specific to our subreddit, we’re working on some exciting, new API implementations down the road that would help improve our own subreddit tools (things like the data in our subreddit sidebar that's been frequently broken recently). More on that at a future time.

Were you forced to reopen?
No, we were in communication with Reddit admins before the blackout even started about our concerns with their proposed changes. We moved forward with the blackout as well as our discussions with them. They did communicate to us that they wanted our community to return, but no threat of removal of anyone from our team was made, nor did we ever feel like we did not have autonomy in the situation. Our mod team had a unified vision, and it was communicated to us that as such we were not going to be ousted or forcibly reopened.

Why open now?
We know that many of you have been eager to regain access to the subreddit and we recognize the significance of r/nba as an outlet. We especially understand how inconvenient the timing of this protest was. At the same time, a prevailing point many of you made in the discussion threads prior to the lockout was that this timing also gave us a unique opportunity to make a larger relative impact and we believe that impact was realized.

We feel that sufficient enough progress has now been made in our conversations with the admin team that this is a good time to reopen.