Pro sports is an immensely vast and profitable business. A lot of mouths are sucking on that teat, or waiting in line. The NBA athletes are predominantly black, as are many of the fans, and many of the blacks are also clawing their way up in team administration and operations.

When sponsors started dropping the Clippers and talk of boycott and strike started going around, enormous pressures developed to get rid of Sterling--ASAP. Its a classic example of economic power in action; you don't need smoke-filled board rooms or shadowy committees of bigwigs pulling strings in the background. The man had to go because he threatened the stability of the whole system. Due process, property rights, social responsibility, overreaching big government intervention, nothing played a role here except he threatened the System. The spice must flow. For all we know, as JEKing suggests below, this was all a corporate maneuver to force him to sell something he did not want to sell.

It was particularly easy to swallow because Sterling was such a distasteful figure, everybody got to feel moral and virtuous about it, but the fact remains: Sterling fairly negotiated top salaries with his players, he broke no laws, and created no environmental or social pollution. He now has to sell a business he built up from 15 to 700G$, perhaps at a loss, simply because he is an asshole.

I still have a very bad feeling about this.