The Ringer NBA Show - Examining the NBA’s Investigation Into Robert Sarver

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Rob Mahoney and Seerat Sohi react to the NBA’s investigation and punishment on Suns and Mercury governor Robert Sarver. They discuss how the investigation was framed, compare Sarver’s situation to Donald Sterling’s, consider what kind of implications the punishment sets for the future, and much more. Hosts: Rob Mahoney and Seerat Sohi Producers: Jessie Lopez and Jonathan Kermah Researcher: Kellen Becoats Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone. This is Chris Ryan from The Ringer. As many of you have heard by now, we lost a treasured colleague and friend over the weekend. Jonathan Charks passed away on Saturday. John was 34. He leaves behind a wife and a son, and we are obviously mourning his loss and sending all of our love to his family right now. If you go to the ringer.com slash Jonathan Charks, that's J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N-T-J-A-R-K-S. You will find a memorial page for John, which has links to his GoFundMe that benefits his family. family and the amazing writing he did throughout his experience. I encourage you to go there, and if you can, please support the Charks family. Briefly, I will just say that John was among the

first people that we hired to work for the ringer, so he was instrumental in defining the voice and perspective of the site. He has as much to do with what this place is as anyone else. And throughout his experience with cancer, John communicated eloquently about the challenges he was facing, both through his writing and his podcasting. You could never stop John from talking about his passions. It's one of the things I loved about him. Over the last few months, you know, whenever we would talk, whenever I would reach out to see how he was doing, I would try to keep it very John focused. And the next thing I knew we would be talking about James Hardin or Better Call Saul. He really loved this stuff. He loved talking about it, celebrating it, debating it,

illuminating it. We're going to keep putting out our pods and writing while we grieve. But we wanted to let folks know that John was in our hearts and that his family was in our thoughts. Thanks for listening. Hello and welcome to The Ringer NBA show. I'm Rob Mahoney. I'm here with Sir at Sochi. And we're here to talk about a landmark day in the NBA. And I say that at a frustration of what the NBA chose to do with that landmark, Sierra, the NBA's investigation into Robert Sarver and the workplace misconduct in the Sun's organization is over.

We're done. The findings were pretty robust. And I think we're going to get into some of the specifics. But the overall picture is one of almost 20 years of abuse. Would you say that's a fair characterization of what happened here and what was going on in Phoenix? Yeah, the investigation pretty much found things that were just, let's just get into it. We're probably not going to remember everything that was in there, but we tried our best. A lot of this corroborates what was in Baxter Holmes article on ESPN that was reported in 2021. That kind of, that was pretty much the impetus for the investigation.

So let's start with the multiple times that Sarver used the N-word after, repeatedly being told not to. Yeah, that's five confirmed times in the report, at least that we know of. Yeah, the first instance was in 2004, and the last instance was in 2016, and it's good that you make the distinction of the last known instance, because this is not one that was caught on video, which will be something that we talk about down the line here. We have instances of inequitable conduct towards female employees, sex-related comments, inappropriate comments about the physical appearances of female employees and other women,

and on several occasions engaging in inappropriate physical conduct towards male employees. I would also just like to get into the nuts and bolts of what that actually is. Those are the words that were used in the investigation. Those are the buckets, the broad buckets of abuse we're talking about. The laundry list of actual things that happened, and in particular that Robert Sarver himself perpetrated, I think is notable and overwhelming in itself. Yeah, we've got him telling a pregnant woman she wasn't going to be able to work after having a kid and taking her off an event, berating a female employee, making her cry, and then blaming her for crying, and then hosting a lunch in which it seems like the goal was to impart onto the more sensitive female employees who, in his words, just, you know, women cry too much, how to handle his demands.

And when we say handling his demands, I would say, you know, how to handle his verbal abuse. abuse. We have him making comments about female employee's sexual orientation, pulling down his pants on a male employee, pulling a male employee's pants down, dancing pelvis to pelvis with a male employee, explaining how he learned what a blowjob was in a business meeting in 2021. That was not very long ago. And asking players whether they shave their testicles, this list, by the way, is not complete. No, does not include the time he stripped nude in front of an employee. and you can really go on and on. Like when we talk about the bucket of specifically,

say, abusive language, demeaning language toward female employees, that's four pages in this report of instances in which that happened. And the punishment that the NBA has deemed appropriate for this particular report for all of these instances in which 320 people, former employees, current employees, victims, witnesses alike, the punishment that the NBA deemed appropriate was a one-year suspension for Sarver in which he's not allowed to participate in anything related to the Sons or the Mercury organizations. He can't be in the office. He can't speak for them. He can't participate in any way.

A $10 million fine, which is the largest allowed, but also is just money to a person who has lots of money. And a mandated course on workplace behavior that I'm sure will be very productive. Sir, what are your general impressions when you hear that remedy to that list of problems? It's really just a slap on the wrist, right? I think everybody pretty much agrees on that part of this, this is, it kind of just goes back to what was said in the investigation that, you know, after everything that we named, after everything that was found in the investigation, the investigation also concluded that they couldn't find any findings of racial or gender-related animus, which I just feel like the math isn't really mathing here.

No. There is an entire section of the report entitled Use of the N-word in which it goes through case-by-case, all of these times in which witnesses have confirmed, and Sarver himself has confirmed, whether it's repeating stories of things that he says, other people said, whether it's him using that word and then trying to hide behind it as a joke or a comment

or trying to put up some kind of shield between him and the implications of it. The fact that the report goes so far out of its way to excuse, I think, his behavior in a lot of ways and remove him from that animus, do words mean anything? I really don't know how to connect those dots in a way that makes logical sense.

Apparently not. Apparently not. I have a lot of problems with that. We'll get into them. I think to start trying to suss out his intentions and coming to that conclusion is ridiculous just because they talked to, by the way, 320 employees, which why put everybody through this exercise if this is going to be the conclusion? In the employees' retelling of events, they feel like it was racist and they feel like it was sexist,

but that apparently doesn't matter as much as Robert Sarver saying that that wasn't what was intended, which doesn't really, that shouldn't matter, you know? Like, I think the burden of proof is on him to prove that that wasn't intended, and he, I don't think, has proved that. And at the same time, if you're going to ask all these employees what, you know, go through this investigation, make them relive all of this stuff over again,

make them dredge up memories that they don't want to think about, at least take what they have to say into consideration. That's probably the most unfortunate part of all this. I think we could look at the specific punishment and what it accomplishes. We can look at the precedent for the league, for team governors, for poor behavior, how it's punished. We can talk about all that. But you're talking about lots of victims in and around the Sons and Mercury organizations who put themselves out there and vulnerable and violated NDAs

and put themselves in a really tough spot. and this is what the NBA has done to justify all of that vulnerability and all of that, as you said, dredging up these terrible experiences they've been through and frankly even the witnesses who came forward to corroborate that information. We've already seen reports from ESPN

about the people who came forward, about people who put themselves out there and how they felt their situation changed by cooperating with investigators after the fact within the suns. And that this is where we end up is just beyond disappointing. It's really demoralizing.

about, I think, the state of where corporations like the NBA are in terms of dealing with this stuff, I would have hoped we'd be better by now and yet. Yeah. Just to get into some of the stuff that the employees have said, we have a response from one of the employees who spoke in the original ESPN story saying, it's barely a slap on the wrist and shows us the league truly doesn't stand for diversity, equity, or inclusion. I'm grateful to have the validation after being told I was insane, a bitch, and being dramatic. That definitely lets me breathe a little, but I'm angry. The league failed us when they

had the opportunity to stand behind its values. This one really got me for a number of reasons, but you can tell that this person had been going through sort of a mental maze themselves, was probably was being gaslit into thinking that these things weren't a big deal, and that this is a type of behavior that should be tolerated, and this is just, you know, this is a demanding boss. And language really, really matters here. And the thing that I've noticed in the way that people speak about Sarver, it shows up in the way that people used to talk about Donald Sterling. And it shows up in this investigation and more lawyerly language is just the way that it's used to make it seem like Sarver did not understand the gravity of what he was doing.

But that's what you're getting into with the animus bit, right? That's why that language is in this report is to create just, like muddle the picture just enough between a guy saying a very explicitly racist thing and this guy is a racist who needs to be bounced from the league. And the NBA is trying to live in that gray area where you can just give him a one-year suspension and he comes back. And I guess lesson learned, everything is fine now. Like that juxtaposition is so stark in all this. And I think the framing of the report itself is very indicative of, I think, where the NBA wanted this to, like, land, which is, if there is animus, if that, if you can trace it back to that of Robert Sarver is a racist, then you are demanding action in a way that the NBA did not want to take.

And I think in a way that a lot of its other governors did not want the league to take. And so by excusing that and by in so many different places in this report, like casting a little weird framing shades of doubt in terms of, like, for example, one of the things we were talking about was the way it talked about the witness's memories. I don't even know why you would include that in there, like the idea that, oh, memories can be fuzzy with time. Maybe we need to weigh these things with a grain of salt. And yet we're talking about 320 people's overlapping memories against one 60-year-old dude who has been protected and trying to protect himself at every step. Yeah. What it says in the report is the investigation was therefore because there was no video evidence

and because there was a lack of paper evidence because the son's HR department was just, you know, they're just, they don't really keep good records. It's like, why wouldn't HR department ever do that? The investigation was therefore heavily reliant on witnesses' memories, which often fade over time and can be affected by external forces, including most notably here, the ESPN article itself. So the suggestion here is essentially that the reporting of the article could have tainted the memories of some of the staffers and made them feel. more negatively about their experiences. Now, to bring this up in general, I think that there is precedents for that, especially in these types of cases. For traumatic situations, like, you know,

for people don't generally want to dredge those back up. For a lot of people, those go into places in your mind that just, you know, you shut the door, and you never really go back there. And those memories can get muddled, And they're not completely reliable. Now, I understand why that is brought up, but at the same time, that can go both ways as well.

There are probably a number of things that aren't in this report that, you know, people probably only remembered after talking to the investigators, right? Like, that's just how these things work. Like, I think that if you talk to all 320 people, you know, tomorrow, the investigation would be different. I think it would be different six months from now. That's just the nature of these types of things. And it's just really, it's really disappointing and it's really disheartening because that's,

that just kind of essential fact about a lot of abusive situations where you're not going to have, you're not going to have video in most situations. You're not going to have audio in most situations. That is often used against witnesses to discredit them, to gaslight them, to make them question their own recollection of events and whether, hey, maybe this was actually just how, this is just how business goes. This is how life is in this fast-paced and high-pressure environment when you have, in his words, a demanding, I guess, way of doing things. Like, he calls himself demanding. And I want to go back to language here because it's really, really vital. And it's, I've just noticed the difference in the way that some people characterize his behavior versus how I would take it or, you know,

how a lot of these employees would take it. Now, I've been, I was going, through this book that I read probably over the pandemic called Loving Sports When Sports Don't Love You Back. It's by Jessica Luther and Govitha Davidson. It's an excellent book. And for anybody who is having increasing trouble, like straddling the middle ground between really loving this sport, like we love this game, right? We were just joking before, like, you know, we haven't recorded a podcast in a while.

The last podcast, I think I recorded was talking about Kenny Lofton, Jr. Like just this sport and all sports bring so much. joy to people, but it is also, you know, there's this other end of it where because of the joy it brings and because of the money it generates and because of the way that that money can inoculate so many people from being held accountable. And by the way, Robert Sarver here is somebody who has never played a basketball game and is being inoculated from accountability because of the success of the league. Like that becomes a very difficult internal battle. So if anybody's looking for a way, looking for that to be put into words,

definitely pick up that book. It is incredible. But they have a chapter in there called Loving Your Team when you hate the owner. And it's about Donald Sterling. And one thing that stuck out to me was the description that a lot of people use for him was eccentric. And sure, right? But like there's probably better language to be used there. And I feel like the same thing is true in the case of Sarver. the things that you hear about him, how he's awkward, how he is just like, he has a weird sense of, a sophomoric sense of humor, essentially equating what he does to locker room talk and framing him almost as this sort of like Michael Scott type of figure who just like doesn't really know how to fit in with the jocks and just like just puts his foot in his mouth as a result of that is just in your

words in your column the other day, the most generous possible reading you can have of his behavior. And it's also just, it's also just wrong. Extremely. Yeah. It's, it's just like, it's the most you can play fast and loose with language. And like the thing that I kind of come back to is that I can't tell you how many times, like, I've been in situations where men have described behavior that I consider to be dangerous that sets off red flags in my mind. that I'm like, this is not somebody I'd want to be alone within an elevator or in a room ever as like awkward or that guy's just kind of weird or he's harmless and you shouldn't worry about him because, you know, like he's just a weird dude. And it's like, okay, yeah, he might be a weird dude,

but weird dudes also oftentimes have a ton of power and are, you know, capable of doing a lot of harmful things. And that's where that language in the report about the memory of the people involved and the witnesses and the victims and the idea that these things can get distorted with time. While true, I think hides a lot of that quote unquote eccentricity in the weeds, right? And I think a lot of those people,

you get into those situations where you have your individual experience with Robert Sarver or with just the general abuse of practices in the Sun's workplace in general, which it seems like it's far more pervasive than just him because of what he is enabled there. But you may not realize the extent of it

until you hear the context. And it's, oh, this wasn't just this thing I saw, This wasn't just me. This is a pattern of behavior from a guy who knows better, who at least should know better, who has been told better repeatedly over time and corrected and suggested that, no, you can't say that. You can't do that.

You cannot take a pregnant woman out of her job because she is pregnant. Like, that is not a thing you can do. And I think the gaslighting piece of this that you highlighted is something that the report talks about a lot. And it's like the legal and HR processes that were in place in Phoenix. to repeatedly protect Sarver's behavior

where it's not just him doing one thing, it's him doing the thing, and then he brings an attorney into the room to tell you why it was okay. And that one-two punch obviously is incredibly potent in terms of silencing lots of people, in terms of making them feel like they won't be supported if they come forward.

But it also just makes it even more ridiculous that you're questioning anyone who comes forward after the fact with this initial ESPN report and saying, I don't know, maybe it's just a trick of memory. You know, maybe you're over-inflating this idea when that's kind of where they're coming from in the first place. Yeah, that's a great point. I love that you brought up how he's been asked repeated times to change his behavior because that completely then goes against the idea that he, you know, he was not trying to cause.

At the very least, he didn't care about the pain that he caused or he didn't think about it, right? In most of these situations, he's either deflecting, he's intimidating, or he's blaming other people for how they react to how he behaves, which is just like, it's like classic. abusive behavior. And like it's, it's also something that, like this one, this one is tricky for a number of reasons, like the lack of,

of video evidence, although there is a, there is video of him at a roast during the pandemic saying some pretty, just weird things. Henry Abbott at Trujooop, I think was like the first person to report that. It was actually even before this,

this report came out where he's, you know, at the, the memorial slash, roast of a former son's minority owner and just like talking about how this guy was just like fucking cheerleaders on a boat. Classic eccentric behavior. Just yeah, exactly, exactly.

Just a weird dude, you know? But it's weird, well, it's all weird, right? But it's hard. It's different than, let's say, the Sterling situation, right? where he was on video being recorded saying these things. And, you know, it just, it kind of, it gets to, I think, what makes this punishment so light as well, because there are ways that allow him to kind of deny

and minimize his behavior. Like, you can see it in the statement that he makes, which is hilarious. Unreal. Because he starts off saying, you know, as a leader, you know, you have to show accountability. And then immediately just goes, while I disagree with some of the things that were said in the report. And there's been reporting after the fact that he basically tried to push back on the fine that he got,

the punishment he got, obviously not feeling very accountable for anything he's done. No, no, not at all. It's a lot of partial accountability. And again, again, deflection, right? But this exists in that area that allows him to do that. It allows him to just question a lot of the things that happen. And I think that that's kind of why we see the punishment being what it is, not just because there isn't sufficient evidence.

There is definitely sufficient evidence. But I think it kind of gets into this gray area that if you're an owner in the NBA, you were never going to be stupid enough to act like Donald Sterling. But if you look at some of the things that Sarver has been accused of doing, you might start to worry about your behavior. Like, oh, just, you know, kind of intentionally being or, you know, thinking unintentionally, perhaps being an asshole is something that I'm sure a lot of owners have thought about like, oh, have I done something that?

Like, like lacking self-awareness, reacting aggressively to moments where they feel challenged. You know, having like, is almost like, like, like, Starbursts seem to have like an almost like animal-like instinct in a lot of these moments. It's like just wanting to bully and berate and just to me. Literally dominate was the word used in the report. And I think that's very telling. And it's worth noting that we've been talking about the race-specific prejudice and language. We've been talking about gender-specific exclusion and behavior.

There's also just like 50 confirmed reports within this report and investigation of just abusive behavior that is in clear violation of the son's own rules. And so it's like, how is all of this? You brought up the idea of sufficient evidence. How is the totality of this evidence not enough? Because it's not on tape, as you mentioned, other than these very kind of supplemental pieces of material, but a lot of these incidents are not on tape. And that has to feel like the instrumental difference right now.

Like we've been circling around the Donald Sterling thing in this entire conversation. I think that's the natural comparison point because you see such a clear delineation between Donald Sterling is on tape saying overtly racist things, he's forced to sell the clippers immediately. He's banned from the NBA for life in 2014. This Robert Sarver thing comes up.

There's an extensive and exhaustive investigation. And as we said, a slap on the wrist, relatively speaking. Are there any other differences there other than one is on tape and one is not? I think the key difference is just how much other owners could feel implicated in the type of behavior that was going on. If you're an NBA owner, you might look at the Sterling thing and be like, I would never do that. But, like, again, you'll look at the Sarver thing. And then you might start to see, like, wonder if there's any skeletons in your closet, right?

Or not necessarily skeletons. Just like open, openly malicious behavior that you might be, you know, that you might just get got for if the precedent becomes that, you know, Sarver is forced to sell his team. So it feels like an instance of self-preservation here. Like, one thing we talked about was just like the, the, the, the, the, you know, the, the fine line that the NBA was trying to walk with this. It felt like they wanted to conduct an investigation that made it seem like they were taking accountability

and not seem totally shameless in actually protecting the interests of Robert Sarver and the other owners. And this is where you got to go back to the fact that that's who Adam Silver works for. I was about to say, is that not just the perfect description of Adam Silver's NBA right there?

is the appearance of doing the right thing while often ignoring the root causes of how we got there, often, you know, just serving the interests of the richest and most powerful people involved, which are the team governors. The more and more we get into the silver era and the more, you know,

we've gotten a couple of incidents like this now in terms of other teams and other situations, the Sterling bit feels so much more like a matter of convenience to me. And it feels like a lot of the league was fed up with Donald Sterling for a wide variety of reasons, including the fact that he was

over a racist. And it was just like, this is a good time to force this guy out. This is a, this is a pretense to do what we already want to do. And so then when you have this case that, as you mentioned, is probably Robert Sarver's behavior is probably pretty parallel to a lot of other team governors or team executives or high, you know, high ranking people and organizations around the league in various capacities. There's a lot of commonality there. You know, this is not a one-off case by any measure. And so when people are seeing the similarities, this isn't Sterling anymore. This isn't something they can clearly identify as being a behavior outside themselves.

This is what results is a punishment that doesn't really fit or solve or address anything at all. Yeah, you've had this great quote from, not a great quote, but a very... Not that great. Not the best. But a quote from Mark Cuban in 2014 on Donald Sterling saying, again, there's no excuse for his positions.

There's no excuse for what he said. There's no excuse for anybody to support racism. There's no place for it in our league, but there's a very, very slippery slope. So you already have an owner like Mark Cuban starting, like in that moment, thinking about what the implications could be for him and other owners if a guy like Donald Sterling gets banned. So there's no doubt in my mind that this is kind of the logic here, because there's also, there is no one else that would be served by Robert Sarver continuing to have this job. It's certainly not the people who work for him. It's not the sons. It's not

Chris Paul or Devin Booker, James Jones, or Monty Williams. Oh, it's certainly not to Andrew Aiden. It's like it's not any of the other owners in the NBA unless, you know, unless they want to make a trade with the sons. Like, not the owners, like not any other GMs in the NBA, rather. The owners are pretty much the only people who kind of benefit from this. So that to me just seems like where this is coming from. The Cuban quote is pretty stark,

considering four years after he said that the MADS themselves were under investigation, you know, as I had this very third. a report of workplace malpractice in Dallas, massive, massive problems. Things ranging from sexual harassment, domestic violence, incredibly sensitive things that demanded like real institutional address.

And I think what was different about that report versus the Sarver case. And I think the MAVs, relatively speaking, it was a lot of, you know, let's put in some new executives, let's get out a few bad apples, but in terms of actual punishment from the league, there was not a lot of overt punishment there.

So the Sons at least have that. But what's different is, that a lot of those offenses, while they were about a workplace that Mark Cuban ran and managed and was in charge of and responsible for, the behaviors weren't directly linkable to him in the explicit

way that they are to Sarver. These are people saying this is the thing that Robert Sarver did. He walked into the shower I was in and stripped naked. He said this explicit thing to me. He tried to disparage me at my job and take me out of it. And it makes

it even more ridiculous that we ended up with this kind of faulty insufficient punishment. And it brings me back again and again to what is enough other than tape? Like, is there literally any amount of evidence that is sufficient enough to get an actual team governor punished for something if it's not fully recorded? I think the increasing answer to that question seems to be no. Yeah, I think, unfortunately, that is the story that the NBA is telling us. And the thing that is devastating about that is the precedent that it sets for the future. If I am, you know, on the board of governors,

I am now looking at this Sarver thing and saying, well, I'm probably not as socially awkward as this guy, which is like in reality, the guy does seem genuinely socially awkward. I probably won't get caught up in something like this. And even if I do, it's a year-long vacation and a fine that amounts to probably not even 1% of my net worth. it feels like the biggest punishment here is just reputational. The fact that everybody knows all these things about Robert Sarver now

actually seems to probably hit harder than anything that the NBA itself has done. And then the other side of it, if I work for a different organization, I feel like the ownership there behaves simulated Robert Sarver, I'm far less likely to come forward about it after this investigation, at least at this jump. I think this is, I think we're probably going to be in this for the long haul. Like the, it's, you know, I feel like the NBA tried to just manage this and shut it down.

And in doing that has probably created a bigger mess because there's just outrage coming from all directions at this point. Like I don't see this going away. I see it probably getting bigger. Well, they've done, they've done nothing to address. If you're an employee of the Sons, if you're someone thinking about working for that team, why would you feel any different today about that prospect other than the fact that Robert Sarver isn't in the building for a year? And that's nothing, by the way, especially since he is going to be, he's going to be working with the NBA to help figure out who's going to be running the suns in the meantime. That in itself. I'm without words.

Like, the idea that this guy is, we agree that he's done all these terrible things, that he's created this horrible workplace. Let's let him choose who's going to run it in his absence. I feel horrible for the people who work there who spoke up, for anybody who works there all for people who did work there. Because it's just, it just feels like such a slap in the face, you know? Like, the bravery that you have to have to speak up in the first place. Like, I'll just say this. Like, they have, anybody who's spoken up has been a lot braver than anybody in the NBA has been certainly in dealing with this. Like, this is just utterly cowardly behavior from everyone involved that actually had the power to do something about it.

But, you know, aside from that, it's just like the anger that people, people are feeling, the hurt, the pain, just like the betrayal, the sense of not feeling protected, it's just, it's just awful. Like, I just, I feel truly awful for the people who came forward and, like, you would hope that something like this would bring them a semblance of peace, like for the ones that want to move forward with their life, or want to maybe continue working in sports one day. And, like, we're hoping to make working in sports a better environment in the future for, you know, it's just, it certainly the, the punishment has not done that. If anything, it's done the opposite.

I think if I was, you know, we're already in the sports world, but if I was looking to, to, you know, try to break, break in, I look at the NFL has always been the worst, right? The NBA has always just had a reputation. Basically, the NBA's whole thing is being slightly better than the NFL, and that's just not encouraging. And hoping you don't remember things. hoping you don't remember the allegation against this player or that or this person in the league or that. Right.

That actually, that's a really good point. That seems to be what the NBA strategy has been for managing a lot of these situations. Like, just hoping that it kind of goes away and that like the games will start and we'll all forget about it. And unfortunately, that is kind of, that is a pattern that happens as well. Like right now it's September 14th. Training camp doesn't open for two weeks. And the regular season starts after that. And it, you know, like it probably will fall to the wayside on some level.

And that is just like the tragic and unfortunate reality of how sports work. Hopefully that's not the case here. Hopefully that hopefully something changes. But that has been the pattern. And that just seems to be like what most of these sports leads tend to bank on happening. And it does absolutely nothing for anybody who's hoping to make sports a better place for people to work in. Like if I, like I would be, if I was on the outside looking in, I would say like, oh, okay, so this is not a place that I'm welcome. No.

You know? The report literally concludes that the Sons have an inequitable workplace for women. Mm-hmm. How that is not a smoking gun in this. Again, I don't understand. This is a guy who runs not only the Phoenix Suns, but the Phoenix Mercury. Why he would be allowed to continue in that capacity after a year. I don't understand.

To me, one of the very notable things from the report was it made clear to, you know, it made clear to note that a lot of the people involved in these incidents have already left the organization. And what that told me was, and really this ruling told me was they were right to leave. Those people were right to think this is not going to get better. This is not going to change. Me and my superiors and my coworkers and my colleagues have already tried saying things to Robert Sarver and we've seen how that has landed previously and that nothing has moved at all. Why would I believe that even an NBA investigation is going to change that? Because it seems pretty clear that it's not going to change much. Like there will be some moving around. They've already

reshuffled and revamped their HR staff. That's great. But the root cause is there. And it hasn't changed. And it's not going to change. I was talking to somebody who worked for the Sons for one year. And just that experience just tainted, tainted their whole idea of ever working in sports again. And now this person just like works in a completely different field doing a completely different thing. And but to that point, it was their dream job to work in sports. Like that's something that's also really, really heartbreaking about all of this is like, it is incredibly difficult to break into the sports world to work for an NBA team especially. There's only so many of those jobs. And especially if you're a minority, right, especially if you're a woman, if you're really

anybody that isn't like a straight white man, it is difficult to break into an NBA team. And it's, it's difficult for everyone. So once you get there after putting in all this grunt work, probably working for chips, working for free for a lot of the time, just like hanging on to this dream, you get in and you find out, oh, this is what it's actually like, that sucks. Like that really sucks. Well, especially, and I think what makes the defenses that Sarva attempted to make on his behalf or his representation, there are some of which are even included in the report, you know, talking about the hiring practices of the Phoenix Suns and how diverse a staff they have, those ideas are just so poisonous

on the back of everything we're talking about which is you hire people of color and then this is the environment you subject them to and you chase them out of those jobs. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff that he tried to use in his favor. It struck me as a little bit Weinstein-esque. Not to completely compare those two situations,

but Weinstein was somebody who very carefully cultivated a persona around being a progressive person to be able to, you know, protect himself from when people came forward. You know, he cultivated a reputation. And I don't think Sarver was quite that intelligent about how he went through these,

went about these things. It feels more like an instinctive protective mechanism for him. But the appendix of the report includes an email that Sarver's lawyer sent, you know, talking about all of Sarver's, good work in the community and how much he is, you know, stood up for the rights of minorities and, like, you know, put his money where his mouth is and things like that, which, you know, to me, it's just like it's, and he, you know, he sat on a, on a board for, you know, just like about,

like, you know, changing policing and stuff like that. And to me, all that stuff is just kind of like, it's really not that hard to sit on a board and give a whole bunch of money to, to wherever when you're rich. Like, these are the things that you have access to when you're rich. And hiring a whole, like hiring, I think they said, 55% of their employees. The basketball operation staff is what I was talking about. Yeah, people of color. That, while that may be true, that doesn't necessarily lend itself to the idea that this man is somehow not a racist. Like, there's a whole other way to look at this.

And you can easily make the case. And I think it's probably closer to the truth that this is an organization that will hire people that feel like they're in more vulnerable positions, like they don't have as many opportunities as other people, so they will have to take more shit than other people and will not feel as empowered to speak up as well. Like, targeting a vulnerable people is exactly what, you know, somebody who is abusive does. When the initial report came out on ESPN, there were a, you know, a run of statements from the Sons and from Sarver. And interestingly, from James Jones, the general manager of the Sons. and it's like putting James Jones in that spot,

I think is indicative of what we're talking about. Yeah, he can be your human shield then. He becomes your human shield. He becomes your character witness and that you're demanding he be your character witness or quote unquote demanding, you know, again, this is a boss who is dominating his employees by the language of this report.

I worry about the next case in which the guy isn't, as you put it, so socially awkward. Like there was so much that Robert Sarver was doing that was like, this guy is clearly weird or off or eccentric or however you want to describe it, there are abusers, there are predators who are much more careful than that, who are much smoother than that.

Much smarter than that. And I worry about them. I worry about the ones who, you know, like, if part of your defense for using the N-word is that you don't recall half the cases you're being accused of, that's not the defense that you think it is. I worry about the people who have everything buttoned up,

who have their story straight on all of the things that they've subjected the people around them too because Sarver is not that. Who have built a better persona around their progressivism or about being smart owners,

smart people, right? Like we have this sort of weird thing in society where the smarter somebody is. We all, like, for some reason. They're virtuous in everyone. Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. And when we know that not to be the case, like the most dangerous thing is a,

is a smart predator, right? The other thing I wanted to talk about is just how Sarver's behavior has seemed to enable an environment where other high level of executives and people within the organization also feel like they have the, you know, just they just have carte blanche to like do all of the stuff that he was doing as well. There is, I think it's like the third part of the investigation kind of talks about, I don't know, actually it wasn't the third part of the investigation. But anyway, there was a part of the investigation that talks about other executives and their behavior towards women, minorities. You know, there was an instance of groping of just saying the exact same thing, actually, that Sarver said, which kind of shows you how this stuff literally trickles down. There's an executive, you know, in a situation where they were looking to hire somebody. I didn't want to hire women because women cry too much, which is exactly what Sarva said. So that just kind of shows you how this type of thing like trickles down.

And it's also something that a lot of the employees said as well, too. Like, they felt that because Sarver was the way that he was, it empowered other people in positions of power to also, you know, be abusive as well. The investigation mentions this, but then also will not make a conclusive statement on that. But, like, it was really weird. The language was very strange. It basically said that enough people who were interviewed said that there was a trickle-down effect,

but that these types of things can't necessarily be proved. So we're just going to say that, but we're not going to conclude that what they were saying was actually correct. You can conclude, however, that there was no racial or gender-based animus, but we can't conclude that.

Yeah. I mean, the signals that are sent by all of this in terms of who is above reproach and who is not, how these behaviors are being transmitted through all levels of the organization, it's tragic, it's unfortunate, I wish it were being addressed on a more fundamental level, but it's just not.

And the more we go through these cases, I think that we're seeing a league that is getting better and better at managing the PR aspects of this. Even this one... I mean, we're upset about this today. Will the average NBA fan even be aware of this story

in two weeks when preseason starts? I don't think they will. I think it's going to get swept up pretty quickly because that's the way, especially these kind of tangential to basketball stories tend to go. And we'll try to circle back to it as much as possible and focus on it as much as possible.

But, I mean, even the Sons themselves, you know, it's going to be Sarver's handpicked replacement running that organization for the next year. It's going to be kind of, you know, not quite business as usual because there are mandated fixes, but we're not there yet. The one thing that also,

I wonder how this will impact how much we talk about this is the fact that the sons are good. one thing that struck out to me in the column that you wrote was how Sarver might not be allowed to necessarily be on the stage, but if the Sun's winning championship, there will be a moment where he is holding a championship trophy. Yeah. Like he'll be holding Larry O'Brien if they win.

And I feel like, especially in the playoffs, but if we, who knows how the Suns are going to play, who knows how the players are going to react to all this stuff, we like we'll see in training camp, right? But if they're good and they go on, I feel like every time now when they go on a big run, that's going to kind of be like the ugly thing in the back of a lot of people's minds. Like I don't see this necessarily going away simply because of the fact that they are good.

Like I'm going to be thinking about that image that you laid out of the idea of him actually holding a championship trophy. And it kind of brings me back to loving sports when sports don't love you back. Like that feeling I think is just going to be there for a lot of people. I think that's a good place to leave it. And thanks, Cyrith. Thanks for listening. Thanks to Jonathan Kerma and Jesse Lopez on production today. Thanks to Kellyn B-Codes for some help from the fact desk.

We'll catch you next time.