With the explosive headlines being splattered all over the place this weekend concerning Clippers owner Donald Sterling, the thing that surprises me is that people are surprised.
Under his ownership, The Clippers have been the doormat of the league for 30 years. He has paid millions of dollars in fines to settle race discrimination suits before in his other businesses. Every star player who ever played for him has fled screaming for the hills at the first opportunity. He flaunts his girlfriends at the games while married. He is just plain creepy. And I don’t mean Joaquin Phoenix creepy, I mean Ted Bundy creepy.
The best thing that was ever said about him is that he is harmless. The only reason other owners tolerate him was because he never won anything and all of his high draft picks became their star players after 4 years.
Only David Stern’s gift of vetoing the Chris Paul trade to the Lakers and shipping him to the Clippers gave the team any life at all.
So, as galactically reprehensible as his comments are, they aren’t the real story. All that it proves is that he is ignorant, an idiot, and a joke. But one isolated douchebag does not a league make. It’s the commissioner’s mess, and Adam Silver will deal with it.
The real story is about the players functioning in the playoffs amid the circus now surrounding them. What we are really looking at is the relationship between owners and players.
Sports teams work differently than traditional businesses. The product on the floor wags the dog. Pro athletes enjoy power that is unrivaled by typical employees. This small group of guys make the wheels of the team’s business go around and are ridiculously difficult to replace. From the player’s perspective, they are the organization. The rest of the team personnel exist merely to operate around them.
The upper management and players share a tenuous relationship based on mutual need. There is no real caring, and a player’s value is only based on his continued performance.
A good coach knows that he is the line between management and the players. Many a coach has lost his players respect by being “management”. It is a fine line to walk, but a necessary one. Any winning team knows that the guys in the locker room go to war every day. It’s the coaches and the players that earn the wins and losses.
The owner, GM, president, scouts and others assemble the team and then sit back and watch. They share opinions and work with the coaches on some issues, but generally from the player’s perspective they are people to be tolerated while the players play.
When things are going well, everyone usually gets along. When things go south either by losing too much or other team drama, then players find out quickly that they have no friends in the front office.
For the Clippers, their job is to rally around themselves and come together. They have to functionally operate like the office doesn’t exist. They are the team.
Believe me when I tell you, no one came to LA to win a championship for Donald Sterling. He is the type of guy who brightens up a room merely by leaving it.
Right now the team is in a tornado of crap dealing with the questions that have nothing to do with them. Having an embarrassing owner or GM is not a new thing. I played for a team where the team president was drunk so often that every team in the league knew that if you wanted to make a trade with us, call right after lunch when he was hammered.
Owners are people, too, and business success doesn’t automatically make you less of a shithead. People just treat you like you are nice because you donate a lot of money to causes. And it doesn’t mean that you know anything about basketball.
Don’t get me wrong. Many individual players are like many individual owners. I really enjoyed spending time with the DeVos family in Orlando and the Arisons in Miami. I like Mark Cuban, and Jerry Colangelo is a class guy all the way. But for the majority of players, the organizational structure peaks with the head coach. The players play, the coaches coach, and if you are above that? You are the coaches’ issue.
So I have confidence that the Clippers will be able to regroup in time to get their collective heads into the playoffs and make a series out of it with the Warriors and possibly beyond. Doc Rivers is a veteran players’ coach and the team should be able to pull together.
It seems appropriate that this should happen in L.A.
How absurd is it to imagine a lawsuit where the wife sues the girlfriend, and the rich, pathetic racist husband is stuck in the middle while the team is fighting for playoff victories. If a TV executive heard that pitch for a reality series, he’d laugh his head off. Too implausible, right? Not today it isn’t.
MORE ON STERLING:
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CHRIS BERNUCCA: SILVER VS. STERLING IS NOT ABOUT BLACK OR WHITE, BUT GREEN
Danny Schayes is a retired 18-year-veteran of the NBA, a professional broadcaster and soon-to-be-published author now penning NBA columns for SheridanHoops. Follow him on Twitter.
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You are a fan of the DeVos Danny? I guess the millions he poured into anti-LGBT campaigns is all class to you.