In light of an explosive report from Sports Illustrated‘s Jessica Luther and Jon Wertheim, the NBA announced on Tuesday night it would “closely monitor” investigations into the Dallas Mavericks’ workplace culture.
Here’s the league’s official statement, per Yahoo Sports’ Dan Devine:
The NBA just released a statement on @SInow's investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct within the Dallas Mavericks organization (https://t.co/q2Eau2rgkW): pic.twitter.com/xJK8gqvfNU
— Dan Devine (@YourManDevine) February 21, 2018
The SI piece in question deserves your time. Luther and Wertheim spoke with former and current Mavericks employees, both male and female, about incidents involving former team president and CEO Terdema Ussery, head of human resources Buddy Pittman and Mavs.com writer Earl Sneed. Though Ussery left the team, ostensibly on his own accord, in 2015, both Pittman and Sneed have been terminated as a direct result of SI’s reporting.
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has been swift and poignant in his response to the piece. While he maintains he held no direct knowledge of the team’s caustic work environment, he’s starting to take the requisite steps to deal with it. Consider this excerpt from the end of Luther and Wertheim’s article:
Meanwhile, Cuban is just starting to deal with the fallout from the behavior of his former CEO and others. Within hours of being contacted by SI, in addition to firing Pittman and initially suspending Sneed (whom he later fired), Cuban said that the Mavs were establishing a hotline for counseling and support services for past and current team employees. He is mandating sensitivity training for all employees, himself included.
“I want to deal with this issue,” Cuban told SI. “I mean, this is, obviously there’s a problem in the Mavericks organization and we’ve got to fix it. That’s it. And we’re going to take every step. It’s not something we tolerate. I don’t want it. It’s not something that’s acceptable. I’m embarrassed, to be honest with you, that it happened under my ownership, and it needs to be fixed. Period. End of story.”
There really aren’t enough words to provide an adequate response to all this. Everything that’s going on in Dallas has been unfolding over a protracted period of time—since before, it seems, Cuban ever owned the team. That it could carry on this long is despicable, and equally unsettling.
The Mavericks may implement the requisite protocols to improve working conditions and ensure this doesn’t happen to such a degree ever again, but that doesn’t excuse the years of non-action. Worse still, the Mavericks, in all likelihood, probably aren’t alone. Professional sports is an industry teeming with gray moral codes and misogyny and general inequality, often behind the scenes. Incidents of this kind, and to this extent, are most likely not unique to one organization.
