Doc Rivers Recounts Clippers’ Donald Sterling Debacle

Getty Donald Sterling, former Clippers owner

It was a little over six years ago, just in the middle of the NBA’s first-round playoff series, that a recording surfaced through TMZ.com. It was 80-year-old Clippers owner Donald Sterling speaking with his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, making statements that would forever change the NBA.

“It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?” Sterling was heard to say. He also said, “You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want.  The little I ask you is not to promote it on that … and not to bring them to my games.”

The tape brought an inside look at a man who had long been a trouble spot for the NBA, a behind-the-scenes racist whose true colors were being shown.

For the players and coaches of the team he owned, it was a different kind of crisis. All involved were angry, like most people around the NBA. But with Game 4 against the Warriors looming, the Clippers had to make important decisions on whether to play or how to handle Sterling very quickly.

“I had to deal with that,” coach Doc Rivers told ESPN this week. “If you ever watched that, the team’s out on the floor, I am still in the locker room, I think I walk out like five seconds before the national anthem. I’m literally on the phone with (team president) Andy Roeser telling him Donald Sterling cannot come to the game. Just think about that. I’m a coach. And I’m telling the owner he cannot come to a game.”

New Doc Chronicles Clippers’ Sterling Saga

Next week, a documentary about the Clippers’ reaction to the Sterling tape, Blackballed, will debut on Quibi. Rivers was among those—along with players like Chris Paul, J.J. Redick and DeAndre Jordan—featured in the movie and relived the experience of pulling together a reaction to Sterling’s offensive quotes.

“It means a lot,” Rivers said about having the movie come out, “it was something that I had to live and go through. It was very difficult.

“I think what this means is we still need to have talk or conversation about racial injustice, about social injustice and it’s a conversation I think we’re still very uncomfortable with. This is a great look at how we handled it, what we had to go through and I think it is a story that needs to be told.”

For Rivers, the challenge was to keep attention on the fact that it was Sterling who had created the chaos, keeping his players from having to answer for the comments made by the owner of their team. He was afraid that by donning Clippers uniforms and playing for Sterling, the players would somehow be offering their support for him.

“I was told that Donald Sterling had made a comment like three or four days before it came out,” Rivers said. “I was told, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ They didn’t say anything about race, they just said he did something. So when I got it, I had an hour before our team meeting. I thought the smartest thing we did, we decided to have one voice, instead of having all the players—I was so concerned about our players becoming the story. My focus was to get the focus on Donald Sterling. He was the racist. We didn’t need to explain ourselves. We needed Donald Sterling to explain himself.”

Donald Sterling Got Lifetime NBA Ban

In the end, things worked out for both the Clippers and the NBA. Adam Silver, then the new commissioner, gained the trust and appreciation of the league’s players because he acted decisively and on principle when handling Sterling, who received an NBA ban.

The team was sold to computer magnate Steve Ballmer for a whopping $2 billion, a record for the sale of an NBA team.

Rivers had much to handle, but he credited the team’s players, too.

“I thought our players, I thought Chris Paul was phenomenal in his leadership,” Rivers said. “Because I had to be the voice for the team and then Chris Paul had to speak as well. And I thought CP did a phenomenal job in how he dealt with it as well.”

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