Sarver situation shows NBA, Silver still cowardly hiding behind players

This past week, the NBA unveiled a 36-page, 12,045-word report conducted by an outside law firm that detailed a number of workplace atrocities committed by Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver. This piece will be much shorter than that, but I will still jump right to the point: the NBA once again took the coward’s path and in doing so put the responsibility for moral action on the shoulders of the players.

This story starts a long time ago (some would say the Garden of Eden) but we’ll pick it up on November 4, 2021. That’s when ESPN’s Baxter Holmes published an investigative report on the workplace culture of the Phoenix Suns and specifically their majority owner, Robert Sarver. It detailed a number of very concerning allegations against Sarver, including words and actions that would classify as sexist, racist, crude and cruel.

Sarver immediately denied the reports, and what is more, raked Holmes over the coals for it. Sarver and other Suns executives were cutting in their denials and counter-attack of Holmes, accusing him of harassment and a lack of journalistic integrity.

The NBA responded by initiating an outside investigation of Sarver and the Suns organization, and the results of that report were released this past Tuesday. The body of the report details numerous actions that are wildly inappropriate, with the following key findings:

• Mr. Sarver, on at least five occasions during his tenure with the Suns/Mercury organization, repeated the N-word when recounting the statements of others.
• Mr. Sarver engaged in instances of inequitable conduct toward female employees, made many sex-related comments in the workplace, made inappropriate comments about the physical appearance of female employees and other women, and on several occasions engaged in inappropriate physical conduct toward male employees.
• Mr. Sarver engaged in demeaning and harsh treatment of employees, including yelling and cursing at them.

The report confirmed nearly everything Holmes had included in his original report, but after detailing that it made a curious moral judgment. It stated that “the investigation made no finding that Mr. Sarver’s workplace misconduct was motivated by racial or gender-based animus.” This was and is an incredibly bizarre and seemingly unknowable claim.

Why and how is the independent law firm making a moral claim? They can’t know for sure what Sarver harbors in his heart, nor should it matter — his actions and the harm they inflict are clear, and his…