Four days after withdrawing support of the Los Angeles Clippers sale to Steve Ballmer, league pariah Donald Sterling has taken new measures to fight back against the NBA. According to NBC and the Associated Press, Sterling has hired four teams of private investigators to investigate Adam Silver, David Stern, and the league’s 29 other owners.
The news comes courtesy of NBC and the Associated Press.
According to the sources, Sterling’s primary target is the league itself — including previous NBA Commissioner David Stern and current league head Adam Silver — whose finances he has questioned and whose revenue he believes are being misappropriated. Sterling’s investigators will also look into previous legal disputes, which are currently sealed, that call into question the league’s alleged discriminatory practices.
Last, investigators will look into the conduct of NBA owners, with the intent of proving that Sterling’s conduct was singled out by Adam Silver due to Sterling’s long history of challenging Stern and Silver over mismanagement of finances, according to the sources.
It’s never prudent to read into rumors, and Sterling seems desperate to take the league down with him by almost any means possible. This could all be simple, meritless posturing. However, it’s rarely surprising when shady, underhanded practices made by those involved in building multibillion dollar corporations come to light under such scrutiny.
Back in April, Dave D’Alessandro of The Star Ledger wrote an eye-opening column on the league’s hypocrisy with regard to Sterling’s heinous actions. D’Allesandro makes it hard to believe that the NBA will come away from the investigation completely unscathed.
The new NBA commissioner has a business partner in Washington who doesn’t know the difference between a tax code and “class warfare,” who bribes bloggers, slugs fans, bulldozes the neighboring Chinatown population into Virginia so he can help put up more Hooters, and asserts that we should all be grateful for the privilege of subsidizing his team.
He has a business partner in Orlando who is so righteous he has poured millions into anti-gay marriage initiatives, because gays “keep asking for favors” and “special treatment,” and marriage is “not vital to them, in my opinion.”
He has a business partner in Cleveland that made billions in the mortgage business, many of them by passing subprime loans along to the ultimate thieves, Countrywide, which greased the derivative machine that helped destroy the global economy.
He has a business partner in Oklahoma City who made his billions through fracking, which has been linked to everything from toxic drinking water to earthquakes to climate change, and then screwed landowners out of their royalties when business went bad.
He has a business partner in Brooklyn who is an oligarch, that special kind of patriot who uses political connections to grab billions in state-owned assets for micropennies on the dollar, leaving much of the population to starve in the feudal cesspool left behind.
For basketball’s sake, let’s hope Sterling’s investigation yields nothing revelatory. The league is a better place when it’s about the game and its players and coaches as opposed to the 30 insanely rich people who run it. Plus, the sooner Sterling is completely removed from relevance the better off we’ll be.
What do you think?
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