N.B.A. Commissioner Hands Clippers Owner Lifetime Ban

[$tevie]

When the Clippers were losing, which they did for 27 of Sterling’s years there, the league tacitly accepted Sterling’s well-documented racism and other flaws. For decades it was perfectly acceptable to let him run his team like “a Southern plantationlike structure,” as the former Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor once charged in a lawsuit. Sterling routinely operated below the radar, so what was there to worry about?
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One of the most distressing parts of the revelations might have been that they did not come as a complete surprise. A string of lawsuits against Sterling over the years — for housing discrimination, for sexual harassment, for failing to pay employees — was not enough to pique the N.B.A.’s interest in disciplining him. A claim in one lawsuit said Sterling did not like Hispanics as tenants because all they did was “smoke and drink and just hang around the building.” A 2009 federal discrimination lawsuit led to a $2.76 million settlement, widely reported to be the largest amount paid in such a suit.

Did the N.B.A. and its team owners somehow miss that news? Or did they just ignore it and hope others would too because, after all, the Clippers were usually so bad that no one really cared what they did?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/sports...point.html