The NBA has received the highest grade ever issued on racial and gender hiring practices among men's professional leagues. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida gave it an A-plus for race and an A-minus for gender hiring this year. TIDES has been studying diversity hiring in sports since 1987.
The NFL and Major League Baseball both showed significant improvement on racial and gender hiring in recent years, but the NBA is the only men's pro league to receive a combined A, the Miami Sun-Sentinel reports.
"I think it's the leadership of [NBA Commissioner] David Stern," said Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES. "One of the things he said to me: 'My goal is we'll be so good, we'll never notice when people of color are hired or fired.' I think the NBA has pretty much gotten to that point in those key positions of coach and general manager and leadership on individual teams. They've just done an impressive job.
"The reason we started publishing the reports was to put pressure on the leagues so that there's public scrutiny there," Lapchick continued. "I think the leagues now understand that diversity is a business imperative, not just a moral imperative."
Read more at the Miami Sun-Sentinel.
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