Almost as soon as this year’s NBA playoffs opening rounds began something seemed to be in the air. Two top seeds were upset at home. Another higher seed, the Los Angeles Clippers, also lost its opener at home at the Staples Center. Now we’re more than halfway through the eight first-round match-ups and in just two of those playoff series, the Memphis Grizzlies vs Oklahoma City Thunder and the Houston Rockets vs the Portland Trailblazers, in just eight games total, there have been an astounding SIX overtime contests.

The eighth-seed Dallas Mavericks are up in their series against the class of the league, the number-one-seed San Antonio Spurs, on an unlikely last-second three-point bomb from deep in the corner by the Mav’s Vince Carter. Four of the series are now tied up 2-2 including the match-up between the team many felt was the league’s best for a good portion of the season, the Indiana Pacers, and the only team to come into the playoffs with a losing record, the Atlanta Hawks.

Even before this past weekend’s game the verdict was in and it was unanimous. In the 68-year history of the world’s premier professional basketball league no one has ever seen anything like it. No playoff opening round has ever been this exciting or competitive or dramatic.

This was shaping up to be the National Basketball Association’s finest hour.

But going into the playoffs one series was touted as being the one everyone most wanted to see. The budding, extremely physical and emotionally charged cross-state rivalry between L.A.’s Clippers and the San Francisco Bay area’s Golden State Warriors, two of the most exciting young franchises the NBA has seen in years.

It was into this context that the taped conversations between Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling and his one-time mistress V. Stiviano came to light this past Saturday morning.

Regardless of the fact that everyone already knew what a piece of shit this man has always been, these audio tapes, graphically demonstrating him verbally intimidating a women of color into altering her Instagram history and attempting to get her to alter as well her associations with other African Americans, changed everything.

All we can hope for now is that the league will act tomorrow with a devastatingly clear and deeply satisfying response to the disgusting information that has come to the surface and continues to shock as more is revealed.

Anyone who thumps on his copy of the NBA bylaws or any other contractural legalities at this time and asserts what the league can’t do is on the wrong side of history and is standing up and voicing an opinion dangerously on the wrong side of the matter of racial progress and justice in the United States.

What the NBA can do is suspend Sterling indefinitely. But what’s important is that they do the most they can legally do now. Immediately. Almost everything else, what they can and will do later with or about Sterling or the Clippers ownership, is a far-off in-the-distant-future consideration. 

The heat on the controversy is so intense right now because of the laser focus on the playoffs and the Clippers presence in the playoffs and the reactions from everyone, past greats, current superstars, and including that of the President of the United States.

Not to mention the reality, not a mere perception, that the story breaking and the league not acting swiftly or strongly enough on Saturday has broken the focus and momentum, if not the spirit of the Clippers — Lob City being maybe the greatest show in professional athletics right now — and is therefore effecting the outcome of the NBA playoffs. 

We are Clippers fans.

Let me tell you all a story from this morning. I’ve been with a certain girl for 39 years. She is as wide-eyed and pure of heart as she was the day she was born, and certainly as she was the day she arrived in LA. She is a Clippers fan. We’ve been Clippers fans for about the last 20 years or so. But she loves the Clippers more even than I do.

When she talks about the Clippers it’s like a child talking about astronauts or firemen. 

So she comes into the bedroom after her shower this morning and says, in that childlike voice, ‘I don’t think the Clippers will ever be the same again.’

It hurt to hear that. And to know it could very well be true. 

This isn’t a product that we can just choose not to purchase or support. This is our team. There is love and there is heartbreak right now in our world that is off the charts. We realize that our beloved Clippers are really a lesser consideration to the greater issue and injustice of the moment. We’re resigned to that. And I think our minds are right in terms of our priorities. 

But the NBA owners and their commissioner, representatives of the owner’s world we all must live in, can fix many many things right now with swift and decisive action punishing this member of their own club, serving racial and social justice while at the same time letting us Clippers fans get back to loving and supporting our team’s playoff run.

And we will support them. Fine young black men who we admire and, as a Clippers fans, love, their hopes and dreams and all their hard work cannot become just so much collateral damage because of what was said by their white owner.