Donald Sterling & The NBA: A Convenient Truth?

A few weeks ago, if you had asked anyone with knowledge of the Donald Sterling fiasco (and thats exactly what it is and has become…a fiasco) about how long it would have taken for the team to be sold, most people thought it would took well over a year. In fact, on Keeping It Real Sports, only one of us thought that by the beginning of the 2015 playoffs, the Clippers would be sold. (Don’t mean to toot my own horn, but it was me.) None of us – NONE OF US – thought the team would be sold before June 2014, but here we are on May 30th and the Clippers have been sold to Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO who also tried to buy the Kings and the Bucks. Not only has the team been sold, but its been sold for almost four times (FOUR TIMES!!) the amount that the last NBA team was sold for.

What I find really convenient is that the league owners were all set to vote on whether or not to kick Donald Sterling out of the league literally days before the June 3rd meeting. Some people would argue that the meeting was cancelled because Sterling was threatening to sue the league for $1 billion in damages caused by his being banned from the league. Conveniently, the lawsuit has been dropped since the meeting was cancelled. It should also be mentioned that (conveniently) Donald Sterling was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and was found to be incapacitated. There seems to be a lot of convenience going around lately.

What people should be asking is…what would have happened if the meeting wasn’t cancelled? The league gets to save face now that the team is sold without any problems. There’s no mess, no lawsuits and no grievance. The big bad wolf named Sterling gets to go away quietly with his money and the Clippers get an owner that isn’t a racist. Chris Paul isn’t under any pressure, Doc Rivers is no longer irate and JJ Redick can stop crying. Because all this was so convenient. Last week, Mark Cuban said he wasn’t sure how he was going to vote because he’d feel like a hypocrite for voting against Sterling when he has his own prejudices. How many other owners feel that way? How many other owners  would have felt the immense pressure of voting out a guy that isn’t really that much different from themselves? Would the vote even have been unanimous?

Another question to ask yourself is, what precedence would now be set if Donald Sterling were ousted from the league by his fellow owners? All 29 men in that office would now be under this microscope that wasn’t there before. In this alternate universe where Donald Sterling has been kicked out of the league, every owner would be watched like a hawk to make sure they didn’t do or say anything detrimental to the league and guys like Cuban or Jimmy “Blues Guitar” Dolan or Micky Arison or Paul Allen or Robert Sarver, etc would all have to be careful or else they’d suffer the same fate that Sterling did.

But all that is a moot point because the team has been sold, Sterling gets his money, the league isn’t being sued and the controversy is over. Its all just a little…convenient.