🏀 NBA ban cost Donald Sterling $2.5M; the Clippers sold for $2B

The recording and the ban

On April 25, 2014, TMZ Sports published a recording of a conversation between Donald Sterling and V. Stiviano in which, TMZ reported, Sterling told her, "It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people."

Four days later, NBA commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling from the league for life and fined him $2.5 million - the maximum the NBA constitution allowed - and said he would push the board of governors to force a sale of the team.

The $2 billion sale

Sterling's wife, Shelly, who co-owned the team through the family trust, reached a deal on May 29, 2014 to sell the Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. Sterling disavowed the deal and sued the league for $1 billion, saying it had violated antitrust laws and his constitutional rights.

A probate court ruled Shelly could proceed as sole trustee, and the sale closed on August 12, 2014. As of April 2015, half of the $2 billion Ballmer paid was still held in an escrow account controlled by the NBA, pending Sterling's lawsuit over the sale.

Half of a $2 billion payday sitting in an escrow account is the kind of problem most people would take.

Sterling had bought the team, then the San Diego Clippers, for $12 million in 1981.

The lawsuit that went nowhere

U.S. District Judge Fernando M. Olguin dismissed Sterling's lawsuit over the sale in March 2016.

"plainly insufficient and clearly implausible"

U.S. District Judge Fernando M. Olguin, March 2016 ruling dismissing Sterling's lawsuit

Sterling appealed, but his attorneys missed the deadline to file an opening brief; the case ended in November 2016 with a three-page motion to voluntarily dismiss it, which the Los Angeles Times reported as a quiet settlement with the league.

Other fines and prices on the record

The ban and the sale were the biggest line items, but not the only ones.

A separate, still-unresolved matter: in 2017, a judge ruled that two law firms could proceed with a lawsuit seeking more than $270,000 in fees they say Donald and Shelly Sterling owe from the 2014 probate case that cleared the way for the sale.