re: #137 Lidane

Mark Cuban has a long history of shooting his mouth off. If anybody is going to be a lightning rod in the NBA after Sterling, it’s going to be Cuban. He can’t help himself.

I think he’s wrong to defend Sterling, but I’m not surprised. He does have a point, though. We’re all prejudiced in our own ways, but it’s not always conscious. HOWEVER, he’s blurring the line between being prejudiced and being racist and they’re two different things. Cuban might have his prejudices like the rest of us, but Sterling was openly racist.

Sterling also displayed a blatant slave owners mentality.

“Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game?”

“I give them food, and clothes, and cars and houses!”

I am certain that if NBA players decided to play at neighborhood community courts there’d be a massive audience. The players make the game, it’s their talent that draws the crowd, that creates the value and generates the revenue. Sterling and the other owners are just monopolistic rent seeking parasites, they add absolutely nothing of value and just siphon off the profits. The owners exploit sentiment in the cities their teams play in and command tax dollars pay for stadiums primarily dedicated to their use. The owners could all die tomorrow and “the game” would go on as if they had never existed.