Tag Archives: NBA
Sterling / Silver
How can somebody so rich be such a fool? LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s bigoted habits were well known around the NBA, yet they never seemed to be a problem for him. He has more NAACP life-time achievement awards than Barack Obama has Nobel Peace prizes.
Well, it’s a problem now.
Sterling / Silver
Word got out that Sterling told his girlfriend not to bring black people to his basketball games. This embarrassed the NBA. New commissioner Adam Silver came down hard. Sterling was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from his own team, and told to find a buyer.
Sterling deserved what he got if you look at it as a life-time boorish behavior award. But he’s being punished for something he said in private, not for anything he actually did.
As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass says, “if you’re an American, you know the back story. It’s race in America. And it’s showtime.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar anticipated all this in a piece he wrote condemning Sterling before his penalty came down:
Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really?…
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?
One and Out at Kentucky
The NBA didn’t accept the University of Kentucky basketball team as a franchise. But it did the next best thing. It accepted its players. All the starters.
NBA Class Warfare
The NBA millionaires want the billionaires to pay their fair share – to them. That would be 52.5% of revenues, which is actually less than the 57% they get now. The owners are holding out for a 50-50 split. Meanwhile the ushers, beer, and nacho sellers are stuck with 100% of nothing.
Fishy in Miami
Guys propose marriage on the Jumbotron all the time at sporting events so why shouldn’t LeBron let down the home town fans on national tv – for a second time, if we’re counting playoff performances? The thing is, LeBron loves the spotlight so much it’s possible he was using his ESPN infomercial to make a confession.
By dumping on his Cleveland teammates again, this time to run off with Dwade and Heronimous Bosh, could he be guilty of collusion?
According to the same ESPN (this time wearing its reporters hat), NBA commisioner David Stern has said, “he’s been assured at the “highest level” that there will be no sitdown among LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and the other superstars”. Well, that’s good to know. Otherwise it might seem suspicious that the threesome signed with the same team for less – 30 million less in James case – than they could have earned elsewhere.
