Should racist comments force LA Clippers owner to sell team?

norm said:

3 scenarios of where the clippers might land:

1 seattle has an owner and (i think) an arena waiting to be built
2 the nba has long wanted the clippers to move to anaheim
3 magic/guggenheim, fresh off their purchase of the dodgers, out bids everyone and keeps them in la

the league should be ashamed that it ignored Sterling's long history of racist and offensive conduct before doing what any right-minded observer knew had to be done as soon as he or she heard the owner unplugged over the weekend.

And in case you are scoring at home, go ahead and blame Silver's predecessor for that.

David Stern never had a problem punishing his players for saying or tweeting remarks deemed offensive. When he fined Kobe Bryant $100,000 over his one-and-done use of an anti-gay slur, Stern said the following: "Kobe and everyone associated with the NBA know that insensitive or derogatory comments are not acceptable and have no place in our game."

Really, David? Donald Sterling had been saying insensitive and derogatory things for years, and what exactly did you do about it?

Stern fined Heat owner Micky Arison $500,000 for tweeting about a lockout, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban about $2 million in all for criticizing the refs. He fined Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor $3.5 million, took three of his first-round picks, and suspended him for a year for basketball's answer to Michael Pineda's pine-tar crime: He got caught playing the kind of funny salary-cap games a lot of executives were playing.

Stern fined then-Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy $100,000 for saying a league official had warned him that Yao Ming would be targeted by refs for illegal screens, and added that Van Gundy was "not going to continue in this league" if he kept talking. Stern fined Spurs coach Gregg Popovich $250,000 for daring to rest his stars in a regular-season game against the Miami Heat. In a different life, Stern even fined Sterling $25 million for moving his franchise from San Diego to Los Angeles without permission before reducing the penalty to $6 million -- this as a counter to Sterling's choice to sue the league for $100 million.

But Stern didn't bother to hit the Clippers' owner, or at the very least investigate him, when he gleefully admitted to trading money for sex. Or when he paid a $2.7 million settlement to the U.S. Justice Department after he was accused in a federal discrimination suit of saying that "black tenants smell and attract vermin" and that "Hispanics smoke, drink, and just hang around the building." Or when Elgin Baylor accused Sterling in a wrongful termination suit of establishing "a vision of a Southern plantation-type structure" for the franchise and of wanting a team of "poor black boys from the South" that, of course, would play for a white coach.
http://espn.go.com/new-york/nba/story/_/id/10857899/shame-david-stern-nba-letting-donald-sterling-stick-around

DewieCox said:

Yes

This isn't a freedom of speech issue. He's not going to jail for what he said. He's in business with 30 other owners and if they feel he's hurting their bottom line, they are well within their rights to get rid of him.