Stern fined Heat owner Micky Arison $500,000 for tweeting about a lockout, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban about $2 million in all for criticizing the refs. He fined Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor $3.5 million, took three of his first-round picks, and suspended him for a year for basketball's answer to Michael Pineda's pine-tar crime: He got caught playing the kind of funny salary-cap games a lot of executives were playing.
Stern fined then-Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy $100,000 for saying a league official had warned him that
Yao Ming would be targeted by refs for illegal screens, and added that Van Gundy was "not going to continue in this league" if he kept talking. Stern fined Spurs coach Gregg Popovich $250,000 for daring to rest his stars in a regular-season game against the
Miami Heat. In a different life, Stern even fined Sterling $25 million for moving his franchise from San Diego to Los Angeles without permission before reducing the penalty to $6 million -- this as a counter to Sterling's choice to sue the league for $100 million.
But Stern didn't bother to hit the Clippers' owner, or at the very least investigate him, when he gleefully admitted to trading money for sex. Or when he paid a $2.7 million settlement to the U.S. Justice Department after he was accused in a federal discrimination suit of saying that "black tenants smell and attract vermin" and that "Hispanics smoke, drink, and just hang around the building." Or when
Elgin Baylor accused Sterling in a wrongful termination suit of establishing "a vision of a Southern plantation-type structure" for the franchise and of wanting a team of "poor black boys from the South" that, of course, would play for a white coach.
Stern had ‘96 Hulk Hogan heat
