For Team Latrell, Stern Must Be the Real Enemy

Billy Hunter goes hard after the league instead of the Warriors. I don’t think he is worried about the Warriors firing Sprewell at all. You want to know why? Hunter doesn’t want to go into court and find out that not only does this morals clause in a player’s contract give the team the right to fire a player for assault, it gives a team even more latitude than that.

For lesser crimes than this.

So they are going after Stern and the league here, and that is why this is a case for our times. Because it is a battle for control of sports. They want Sprewell to be not only the victim of a dictator coach but of a dictator commissioner. So the more the player spoke Tuesday after apologizing to Carlesimo and Garry St. Jean, the Warriors’ general manager, the more he sounded like the injured party.

“[My teammates] really know what happened,” Sprewell said.

“Somebody has to see that [Sprewell’s] rights are protected,” Johnnie Cochran said.

Nobody at the podium Tuesday talked very much about what would have happened to P.J. Carlesimo if somebody hadn’t finally pulled Latrell Sprewell, good person, hard worker, off him on the afternoon of Dec. 1. Nobody wants to think too hard on that one as we get deeper and deeper into how unfairly Sprewell has been treated here with a firing he earned and a suspension that he deserved.

Somebody has to uphold what little law we have left in sports. Stern did that.