Could it be the NBA is willing to flex its muscle in ways the NFL never would?
Seattle Seahawks star cornerback Richard Sherman, leader of the league’s best and Super Bowl winning defense and owner of a newly minted $57.4 million extension, seems to think so.
Sherman tells ESPN he doubts NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would have taken the same steps NBA counterpart Adam Silver did late last month in banning longtime L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling from the game and imposing a maximum $2.5 million fine on him after audio of him admonishing a girlfriend “not to bring black people to my games” was made public.
“Because we have an NFL team called the Redskins,” Sherman added in justifying his reasoning. “I don’t think the NFL really is as concerned as they show. The NFL is more of a bottom-line league. If it doesn’t affect their bottom line, they’re not as concerned.”
Sherman even hinted in some ways the views expressed by Sterling reminded him of the backlash and criticisms he received after voicing a semi-rant of his own following an NFC title game win over San Francisco.
“I wasn’t really shocked or anything because of what I saw after the incident,” he told ESPN. “You’ve got a lot of racial backlash, and a lot of racist comments that were uncalled for. I can never see a time where racism is called for. So it didn’t shock me as much as it would have had I not experienced that personally, had I not seen those things.”
Sherman later added “it showed me that America still had some progress to make. On equality, and understanding that it doesn’t matter what color you are, you treat people as people. And whether a good person or a bad person, you don’t judge them off the color of their skin. That’s why a lot of people shy away from the conversation that I forced on us in January. People want to it to be done, they want that uncomfortable truth to be over with, they want the racism to be done, they want to believe everything is great and hunky-dory. And it’s not.”
