The NBA was rocked to its core by the bombshell that erupted in April 2014 when audio recordings of longtime Clippers owner Donald Sterling making overtly racist remarks to his mistress, V. Stiviano, surfaced. Nobody was surprised that Sterling was a racist, but the recordings' blatant, overt racism sparked a backlash. State Farm, CarMax, Kia, Red Bull, Sprint, Corona, and many other significant teams and league sponsors quickly dropped the Clippers.
The Clippers team and coach, who were five games into their first-round playoff series against the underdog Warriors, were caught amid the conflagration. The Clippers players contemplated a boycott before deciding to participate, but they turned the symbol on their warm-up shirts inside out.
The Warriors also contemplated a boycott. And after the fact, Stephen Curry told Matt Sullivan of Rolling Stone that he wishes his team had skipped Game 5.
Curry and his teammates wanted to leave the court after the jump ball, so Curry privately discussed a coordinated player response with Clippers star Chris Paul twice. The Clippers wore warm-up shirts with the emblem inside out before throwing them away at centre court. The Warriors ultimately accepted Sterling's lifetime suspension from the NBA as their opponents' preferred form of protest.
Curry told me, "One of my biggest regrets is not calling for a boycott of the game. That was an opportunity to elevate beyond what we could have stated."
The Clippers squad, which had 57 wins and was thought to be a title contender, struggled with their choice and almost boycotted. But not for Sterling; the Clippers players wanted to take the court for each other. Even if they wanted to do more, Curry and the Warriors were justified in bowing to CP3, Blake Griffin, and the rest of the Los Angeles club. The players' perception that the league was taking action, which affected their decision to play, led Adam Silver to impose a $2.5 million punishment, a lifetime ban from the league, and the beginning steps toward forcing a franchise sale. The NBA ultimately forced the team's sale to Steve Ballmer thanks to a Machiavellian manoeuvre by Sterling's wife, Shelly. Since Sterling paid $2 billion for the Clippers after purchasing them for $12.5 million, no one should view him as a loser in this mess.
The players may have been able to do more at the time; a boycott would have given them more significant clout and delivered a more explicit message of their disapproval. But there were no simple choices at the time. In the end, the Clippers defeated the Warriors in seven games, but the Sterling scandal killed their playoff run, and the Thunder defeated them in the next round.
While everything was chaotic, and there were no clear-cut options at the time, Curry now benefits from hindsight. Although Sterling was eventually on his way out as a result of the players' protest at the time, we will never know how widely felt the boycott's message would have been.
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