Why Has Phoenix Suns Owner Robert Sarver ONLY Been Suspended For A Year?

The NBA has found another racist owner in its midst. Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver has been suspended for the entire 2022/23 NBA season and has been fined $10M as the investigation into him found he engaged in racist and sexist behaviors during his 20-year ownership.

The NBA really does have a problem with these owners. Sarver is now the second NBA owner to be exposed for saying racist, misogynistic, and sexist comments to his minority and female employees (the first was none other than the charmless Donald Sterling). What makes this situation that much worse (and more idiotic, in my opinion) is that Sarver was saying these things via emails, text messages, and videos.

Sarver is not only shameless, but also the biggest idiot. Only a self-absorbed, arrogant, idiotic person would not only say these kinds of things to his employees, but also write them in incriminating and lasting emails, text messages, and videos.

He’s Jon Gruden 2.0.

Anyway, being serious, he’s very lucky to only have a 1-year suspension handed down upon him. The NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, has already made a precedent of forcing owners to sell their teams when such vitriol comments they have made come out.

As I mentioned earlier, Donald Sterling was removed as the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers when racist comments he made were leaked to the public. Why hasn’t Sarver suffered the same fate? There comments are eerily similar.

Now, the 43-page investigative report (yeah, it’s that bad) into Sarver revealed that the Suns owner said the N-word but used it in a purporting context. Personally, however, I don’t see a major difference in saying the N-word directly versus repeating it in order to quote another person who said it as everyone knows not that they shouldn’t say it, regardless of the context.

Plus, I haven’t even gotten into the hundreds of sexists and misogynistic comments he made to his female employees. Sarver may have only repeated the N-word from another, but those sexist and misogynistic comments all originated from his own mouth and brain.

If I was Adam Silver, I would have booted him out of the Suns just as Silver did to Sterling with the Clippers back in 2014. Sure, Sarver may not be overtly racist (though, he was obviously fine with repeating the N-word if someone else said it), but he’s obviously misogynistic. And I mean BLANTANTLY misogynistic. (Check out this Yahoo article to see all of the details from the Sarver report. It’s bad.)

Is there really a redeeming quality to just being misogynistic, which has seemingly saved Sarver his ownership, rather than being misogynistic AND racist? In my opinion, there is not. One is just as bad as the other. Hating/disrespecting someone based solely on their appearance is unacceptable, regardless of whether it is due to skin tone or gender.

Frankly, the Robert Sarver in this report seems like a creep and an extremely disrespectful man that has no place in managing a McDonalds, let alone one of the NBA thirty franchises.

Yet, I guess Adam Silver and his executives felt differently as they have just decided to suspend him 1-year and fine him $10M (even though he’s worth $800M).

We’ll see if Sarver can fully redeem himself and get back into the good graces of the NBA and his employees during his ban, though I have my doubts that he will. This sort of thing just doesn’t (justifiably, I should add) go away.

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Other Sources: (Yahoo Sports) (Phoenix Suns and Mercury owner Robert Sarver suspended by NBA for one year, fined $10 million (yahoo.com))