LeBron James, NBA Players Ready to Boycott NBA Season if Donald Sterling Stays with Los Angeles Clippers
The Donald Sterling drama is far from over and if it’s not resolved when the 2014-2015 NBA season, the league could suffer as some NBA players led by superstar LeBron James threatened to boycott next season.
Via an article from CBS Sports from the Jim Rome on Showtime program, Roger Mason Jr, vice president of the NBA Players Association (NBAPA) said that he talked with the Miami forward about shunning the NBA if Sterling stays in place in Los Angeles.
"If it's not handled by… the start of next season, I don't see how we're playing basketball," said Mason, a former NBA player himself. "I was just in the locker room with LeBron… At the end of the day, you know we have leaders. We have player reps, we've got executive committee members… Leaders of the teams, they're all saying the same thing, 'If this man is still in place, we ain't playing'."
The threat isn’t only against Sterling but stretches to the entire family as well.
“There's no place for that family in the NBA,” added Mason when asked if the Sterling’s wife, Shelly takes over as owner. Sterling is in hot water after an alleged racist conversation with a girlfriend leaked out to the public in April.
"Under the NBA constitution, if a controlling owner's interest is terminated by a three-quarter vote, all other team owners' interests are automatically terminated as well," NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in NBA.com article.
"It doesn't matter whether the owners are related as is the case here. These are the rules to which all NBA owners agreed to as a condition of owning their team."
This is not the first boycott talks by the NBA players. At the height of the controversy, they threatened to stop play during the first round of the playoffs if no action was taken against Sterling. However, it never materialized as new NBA commissioner Adam Silver took a swift action against the Clippers owner banning him for life from the NBA and fining him $2.5 million.