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An ESPN reporter has collected the testimonies of 70 former employees regarding Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver's behaviour. And it doesn't look good for him.Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Not so long ago, the story of an NBA owner running amok in his own organization would have landed like a neutron bomb.

Panic would have been the order of the day. You could pretty much guarantee the wrong person would “no comment” the problem into a true crisis. Foot dragging and communications confusion would make things much worse. In the end, they’d have to burn off healthy limbs to save the body.

But nowadays, with such things a commonplace, everybody knows the drill.

On Thursday, ESPN launched a 7,000-word broadside on Robert Sarver. Sarver is a trust-fund type who runs his dad’s real estate outfit and has a majority stake in the Phoenix Suns.

According to the deeply reported piece, Sarver is the sort of boss who keeps the bathroom stalls at head office filled with weeping employees.

Some of the many, many accusations contained therein – that he likes to casually drop the N-word into conversation; that he is a screamer and a hysteric; that he once invited his management team to ogle a picture of his wife in a Suns bikini; that he would burst into the team dressing room at halftime and begin drawing up plays; that assistant coaches were not allowed to hold pens or pads on the sideline because it would interfere with their lusty cheering; that employees, particularly female employees, live in fear of him.

“It was a clown show,” one anonymously quoted staffer said, nicely summing up the situation.

The first thing that leaps to mind is Donald Sterling, the former owner of the L.A. Clippers who was caught in a series of racist outbursts.

The substantial difference between the two situations is audiovisual. In Sterling’s case, there was tape. In Sarver’s, it’s all anecdotal. Never underestimate the public’s ability to lose interest in something that involves reading.

The Sterling situation caught the NBA off guard. The league dithered away the crucial first hours. That allowed Sterling to respond through the team, which was a terrible mistake on everyone’s part. It wasn’t until players leaguewide began agitating in public that the NBA swung forcefully into action. Then it took the decision to ban Sterling for life.

That happened in 2014. So, forever ago.

Nowadays, taking down a team owner or top executive is the deer hunting of sports journalism. Currently, the deer are running so thick that all you have to do is aim in any direction and you’re likely to hit something.

Something about great power in sports lends itself to people behaving as if they are part of Caligula’s court. It’s almost as though extreme wealth and constant adulation aren’t good for human development.

A new sense that the people on the bottom don’t have to constantly take it in the chin from the people on top has created a seller’s market when it comes to journalistic takedowns.

It’s right and good to call attention to abuses of power, especially when they take place in cultural institutions that enjoy wide attention. The wrinkle is that there are now so many instances of these stories popping up – some very bad, some middlingly bad, some merely stupid – that people start to lose interest.

Under the heading ‘self-defeatingly stupid’, there’s Edward Rogers’s tinkering in the Masai Ujiri re-signing.

In the now normal way of things, the Rogers/Ujiri story was pushed out of the public discussion by a (very bad) scandal – the Chicago Blackhawks’ sex-abuse story.

That scandal was in turn overtaken by the (also very bad) Sarver story. In a few days time, that will be trumped by something else.

Wherever that next transgression stands on the sliding scale between atrocious and silly, it will suck up all the oxygen because it’s fresh.

About a week. With some exceptions, that’s the amount of time the focus of any scandal needs to survive before the wider public moves on.

Knowing that, leagues have refined their reactions since the Sterling affair.

The first rule – jump on it fast. Within a couple of hours of ESPN’s report, the NBA had taken over the messaging.

The go-to move these days – hire a law firm to investigate. Somewhere, there must be a big 1-per-center group chat where such things are arranged.

Pushing the problem off to the lawyers buys you a few weeks, maybe a few months. Most important, it allows everyone involved to ‘no comment’ with impunity. Just say the words “active investigation” a lot.

“My reaction is that it’s a lot to process,” Suns coach Monty Williams said on Thursday night. “For me, it’s still not clear, as far as the facts are concerned.”

That is the magic formulation. Everyone has it memorized now.

In the interim, the league goes to work either resolving the breach or sealing off the compromised compartment and ejecting it from the mother ship.

If it can’t manage that in time, the league goes to war with the offending party. Done right, the league fixes it so it ends up becoming the good guy in the story, even though it was the one in charge for all the years the offender was running wild.

Floating above everything is the understanding that no matter how bad it gets, everyone is focused on a single goal – making money. As long as money continues to be made and franchise value increased, all problems are surmountable.

Parallel with the NBA’s effort, Robert Sarver is also counting on scandal fatigue to save him here.

He has either denied everything in the story, or tried to explain it away as a misunderstanding. He says he “welcomes” an investigation – another new, go-to move. Don’t struggle. Be a rock in the river. Let it flow around you.

Given an ESPN reporter was able to line up 70(!) current or former employees against him, this doesn’t seem like a viable strategy.

It doesn’t take a crisis PR team to tell you Sarver’s finished. It’s just a matter of how many times he will flip in the air before he lands on his face, and how much he’s getting for his team stake.

Whenever he does go, it won’t be a major news story anywhere but Phoenix. By then, some other, fresher sports outrage will be appalling and titillating the public.

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