Moderator Action
Moving thread from General Questions to The Game Room.
If by “governing body of sorts” you mean “kind of like the government” then No, it’s not. What’s this gray area you see? The NBA and other sports leagues have very broad powers to determine who is eligible to become a team owner.
I understand the NBA isn’t the government.
The grey area I see is, if I’m an employer and I tell my employees no talking about Gay issues. On or off the clock.
Can I do that?
I mean, on the clock, maybe, because that’s my time. But if someone hands me a recording of an employee talking about SSM on their personal time, am I with in my rights to fire the guy?
I don’t feel like I should be.
Yes you can be fired for saying things in your private life that reflect badly on your company.
However, the NBA is not Sterling’s employer. It’s a partnership that has decided it no longer wants him as a partner.
We have all kinds of protection against oppression by the government. We don’t have a lot of protection against oppression by private corporations.
I have a vague notion that sports leagues in Europe have some sort of quasi-governmental status. That’s not true in the United States. The MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL are completely private partnerships owned by the teams in those leagues. (One NFL team, the Green Bay Packers, is actually owned by a community-based organization. The leagues will never let that happen again.)
(Incidentally, that’s one reason we’ll never have promotion/relegation in the United States, because the 30-ish teams in the top-level league are themselves the owners of the league.)
From what commentators have been saying, the exact wording and all the different provisions of the league-owner agreements are private. But… the league would be stupid to have a setup where they could not control all aspects of an individual team if the need arose, up to and including “repossessing” it. As others have mentioned, usually this is due to financial difficulties, not a dispute like this. I would be very surprised if it’s not in their contract to simply “take over” the team in the event of a serious falling out (Like say, he refuses to pay the $2.5M fine). One thing mentioned is they can also force a sale, and of course in any league, the new owner must have approval from the board.
Not so fast there… businesses are not as free to do or not do business with whomever they want to as they once were.
The NBA would have to be very stupid to allow team owners to break up their teams in a fit of pique. I am going to assume they are not that stupid, and anyway, Donald Sterling is no longer allowed to be involved with the team, and it looks like the NBA will take control of the Clippers very soon.
Mark Cuban (who owns a team) said essentially this on the news this morning. That forcing someone to give up property because of their opinion “isn’t America.” It sounded like he won’t support forcing Sterling to sell the team.
Sure. You can tell your employees anything you want (assuming you’re a private entity). As far as the question “am I with in my rights to fire the guy?”, that depends in part on the laws of your state (or other municipality). If you’re in an ‘at-will employment’ state, you can fire your employees for any, or no, reason at all. And for the record, ‘people who talk about gay issues’ is not a protected class.
And then your employees (or former employees, as the case may be) can go tell the press about your rules. And the press can make them public, and your customers, business associates, etc. can take whatever actions they deem appropriate.
Which is pretty much exactly what happened to Sterling in this case.
The announcement - in which Silver banned Sterling. 
Put very very generally, the government isn’t allowed to punish him for saying horrible stuff. What the NBA can do is another story and it depends on the NBA’s bylaws, which he has agreed to.
I think he probably will probably vote in favor, pending assurances from Adam Silver. In any event I think the votes are already there. They’ll start talking about the timing of that move on Thursday.
At his age he better have that other fight really soon or he may not.
The NBA has already served notice that it will be taking over management of the team within days. Sterling can sue and seek and injunction. The problem for him is that the longer the process plays out the more the franchise loses value. With sponsors leaving and the other turmoil, the value decreases. Only Sterling will lose the longer it plays out. The value of franchises is not as arbitrary as it might seem to the business interests that buy and sell them.
Doing something radical would not work at this time. A team can’t even change the design of their uniforms without league approval. If he somehow bankrupted the franchise the league would step in and arrange for a new buyer. Think of the Phoenix Coyotes.
He could, but I think he’d just be wasting his effort. A more fruitful avenue of litigation/negotiation for him would probably be in determining the value of the franchise. I don’t know the details of NBA rules, but I suspect they require a divested owner to receive “fair market value” for the team. I dunno if they specify a method for deciding what the fair market value is, but even if they do, there is probably still room to argue about it if they don’t come up with a number he likes.
There are people lining up to buy the team, so there’s probably going to be a bidding war, and Sterling will endup with an extra billion or so to soothe his bruised ego with.
I read that currently the franchise is valued at about $700 million, 13th most valuable in the NBA. We’ll see what it actually goes for. At whatever price, it will be far beyond the $24 million he paid for it. Not a bad return for mismanaging a franchise for so long.
Speaking as a European with a strong disdain for spectator sports I have absolutely no idea whether this is so, but at any rate it’s the first I’ve heard of it.
Soccer teams are traditionally owned by dodgy Russian oligarchs; rugby teams seem to be owned by the local private associations; race car formulas are owned by the strangest little men imaginable. ( Actually leased from the French FIA. )
Anyway, I’ve never heard of this bloke, nor have the faintest interest in his thoughts and dreams whether excusable or condemnable; however, I noticed he has been disbarred by his private views from the sport for life, which in my understanding is the same as being kicked out, with no hope of return.
In such a case why does he have to pay a massive fine to them ? This is not a legal penalty: it has all the gravitas of a chess club privately imposing a fine for cheating, or the snail-racers’ league giving out a fine for doping.
If I was kicked out of a dolls-furniture model-making group — to adequately compare the importance of whatever ‘sport’ this is — for having bad thoughts, and they shouted ‘Never darken our doors again !’, and then added: ‘We’re fining you a $1000 for the bad thoughts, we’ll send a bill’, I’d be like: ‘Good luck with that.’
He’s being kicked out of a private club for his private views.
When he joined this private, profit-oriented club, he agreed to a set of terms that would allow the club to fine him or kick him out if he did certain things to hurt the club’s reputation or profitability.
If your chess club generated billions of dollars a year in revenues and you had to pay hundreds of millions to join, then the club might very well subject you to contracts in which you agreed to let then punish you in all these ways. If you said “good luck with that,” they would go to court to enforce the contracts and it would turn out to be very bad luck for you.
A person like Donald Stern doesn’t really own his team outright. It’s more like he owns a share of the league as a whole and the league grants him certain rights to run his team as he wishes, but subject to a lot of conditions, including ones that make him subject to fines and controlling when and if he can sell his shares, and to whom.