He’s banned from any contact with a team he owns. The NBA wants to try and force him to sell the team. That’s more than inconvenienced.
It’s true this is a business decision. CYA for the NBA which has white owners, and mostly white referees and coaches giving orders to players that are mostly black. Definitely a serious image problem that was made worse by the recent news. They needed a scapegoat before too many people speculated about the other NBA owner’s private thoughts on racial equality.
Is Jordan the only exception to the NBA’s group of white owners? I seem to recall there may be someone else. Magic Johnson? Does he have an owners share?
Where were you when Linda Tripp’s recordings were getting Clinton impeached? Or when people were trying to trip up Obama for his guns comment? The reality is that anything said between two non-married people, or outside of a few limited relationships, is potentially public. It’s always been that way, and feeling bad for Sterling is misplaced. Are you really saying you think what is said between a man and his mistress is somehow inviolable or even unlikely to get out? It’s a pretty huge leap to posit our bedrooms will soon be monitored.
Besides, Sterling is not being punished for his thoughts but rather for being a financial liability.
Not really. Owning a big league team is like a luxury or being a member of an exclusive club. It doesn’t affect his life in any meaningful way to be parted from it.
Yes, for a billionaire being forced to sell the team (which will probably get him close to a billion dollars) and not show up to games is a very very mild inconvenience that will barely impact his life at all. I believe Jay Z is part owner of the Nets isn’t he?
The only non-white majority owners are Michael Jordan (Charlotte) and Vivek Ranadive (Sacramento). There are a few non-whites who have minority stakes like Shaq and Nelly. Jay-Z sold his stake around a year ago so that he could become a sports agent.
George Steinbrenner was permanently banned from MLB in 1990, and back in 1993. Not that I expect Sterling’s ban to be lifted, but what the Commissioner imposes, the Commissioner can lift, given signs of repentance.
Of course, if they force him to sell, then the ban becomes somewhat moot.
Much like the former Dodgers owner, Sterling might be forced to sell his franchise at an opportune moment, shortly before the NBA renegotiates its lucrative national television contract. An auction-like frenzy could drive the price toward $1 billion
I’d like to know if anyone here knows what would happen if the NBA wants him to sell the team and he refuses. Can they force him to sell? Can they put up the team at auction and sell it to someone regardless of what Sterling wants?
Does anyone know what the eventual outcomes of this drama could be?
And that’s another thing, the owner of an NBA team doesn’t own the team outright like normal property. He owns it in a kind of co-operative relationship with the rest of the league and is subject contractually to their decisions.
If African-Americans had as strong an influence in politics as they do in the NBA…yeah, I can easily see a universe where Byrd is unable to successfully hold public office. In comparison, just how many pre-Apartheid leaders held to their office after 1994? I wouldn’t think a lot (no matter how much they changed).
I’m perfectly fine with Sterling changing and becoming a better man; however the NBA doesn’t need him (nor do they want him) hanging around, like a bad old fart, killing profits.
Well, it’s not like they’re sentencing him to death. Should he up and decide to spend the next few years using his fortune on scholarship foundations for underprivileged African-American teens and the production of self-starring public service announcements on social equality among the races, I’m sure Silver and the owners have the power to reconsider. I imagine the “banned for life” phrasing is more or less a commentary on the perceived likelihood of that happening.
Donald Sterling has a very long and bigoted track record. Why should the NBA treat his “chance to change” as more important than the feelings and dollars of its players and fans? That’s one of the reasons it is so annoying when people twist themselves into rhetorical knots trying to find a way that some racist newsmaking comment isn’t really racist. I understand that nobody should be falsely accused of prejudice and I know the fear of being misunderstood runs very deep on the internet, but the unfortunate side effect of this excuse-making and insistence on extra chances and backwards interpretations is that people who say and do racist things are given an extraordinary benefit of the doubt and people who are targeted or offended by those comments are told their feelings are less important than the feelings of a bigot. That’s not right.
It hasn’t really been answered. I think Stiviano suggested Sterling wanted her to record all their conversations so he could review them and remind himself of any brilliant business ideas or whatever. Since his estranged wife is suing Stiviano it’s also possible she thought this was a good idea for any number of different legal reasons. It sounds like the lawsuit is over jewelry Donald Sterling gave to Stiviano.
I could see folks arguing that there may be a general public overreaction, but I do not see the NBA as overreacting. Given the scope of the publicity and the public outcry the story had received I think the NBA made the appropriate decision both for moral and economic reasons.
It was an intentional sting to embarrass and damage him. It seems to have worked spectacularly. She was tired of his attempts to manage her social life, and figured she would expose the public to the kinds of outlandishly racist shit he continually said in private. Like I said upthread, this is a case where none of the major players comes off looking good at all.
You’ll have to explain - for the benefit of the slow kids in the class like me - why “an intentional sting” designed to force a powerful man to endure the consequences of his abhorrent actions and beliefs that he had heretofore managed to avoid should make me think that Ms. Stiviano comes off looking badly.