The NBA Stops Using Completely Innocuous Phrase, Cites Racial Insensitivity

This is one of those double-take stories where you have to make sure it’s not a Babylon Bee or The Onion article.

The NBA has decided that the completely innocuous, objective descriptor of “team owner” is racially insensitive and is stopping its use within the NBA. Yes, people who own teams are no longer allowed be called the owner of their teams.

The NBA has banned the term owner, as in team owner, because it is racially insensitive and has replaced it with governor per commissioner Adam Silver. I am not joking. This is real life.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 24, 2019

This seems normal.

Apparently, some players, including Draymond Green (already one of the most drama-stricken players in the NBA), have complained that it’s racially insensitive to have a figure above them in the hierarchy being described as an owner. Correlations to slave ownership and all that.

“You shouldn’t say ‘owner,'” Green said. “When you think of a basketball team, nobody thinks of the f–kin’ Golden State Warriors and think of that damn bridge. They think of the players that make that team…you don’t even know what the f–k [the bridge] is called.”

If that’s not a solid, logical argument, I don’t know what is. And who doesn’t know the name of the Bay bridge?

Of course, essentially no one ever has described a team owner as “owning” the players on his team. The person who owns the team literally owns it as an enterprise. This kind of shifting of language is just nonsensical and completely unnecessary. Every business has an owner and there are plenty of them with majority black employee bases. What makes the NBA so special here that they need to distort language this way?

The term governor will probably be found to be problematic soon, as it could be twisted historically as well. Then we can move to team “stakeholder” or something more ridiculous because no one is ever happy.