- NBA strategy to include some documents that included morals clauses, source tells CNN
- League’s finance committee meets about forcing Sterling to sell team, will meet again next week
- Sterling friend Tommy Lasorda says he is not surprised by the owner’s remarks
- Clippers play a road playoff game on Wednesday night
(CNN) — The National Basketball Association’s strategy for forcing the sale of the Los Angeles Clippers by Donald Sterling hinges on a document the owner signed when he bought the team in 1981 that lays out reasons ownership could be terminated, a source familiar with the situation said Wednesday.
Sterling has been banned for life from the team’s day-to-day operations and facilities and was fined $ 2.5 million last week for racist comments that were recorded and posted online late last month.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has asked the other 29 NBA owners to force Sterling, the longest-tenured owner in the league, to sell the Clippers.
The matter is with the Advisory/Finance Committee, which met Wednesday on a conference call. Members discussed the “termination of Mr. Sterling’s ownership of the team,” the NBA said in a news release. The committee will meet again next week, the statement said.
If the case proceeds to a full vote, 75% of the owners would have to approve the forced sale.
The source told CNN that on several occasions since 1981 Sterling has signed other agreements with the NBA — some within the past decade — that contained moral clauses.
Sterling’s comments, the source explained, puts the 80-year-old owner in violation of Article 13(d) of the NBA constitution, which states that an owner can lose the team if he fails or refuses to “fulfill its contractual obligations to the Association, its Members, Players, or any other third party in such a way as to affect the Association or its Members adversly.”
It is unclear what percentage of the team Sterling owns. A family trust owns the Clippers, and his wife, Shelly Sterling, has indicated that she is a co-owner and wants to keep the team.
Donald Sterling, a lawyer and billionaire real-estate investor, has not spoken publicly since the celebrity gossip
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