What DEI Would Look Like in the NBA

The NBA wants diversity everywhere but in the hands that dribble the ball.

After the growing backlash to DEI, the Cleveland Cavaliers told NBC News that while other organizations may be moving on, the NBA team was sticking with the racist program.

In 2023, Cavaliers CEO Nic Barlage vowed to tie DEI metrics to bonuses and make sure that DEI would be “organically woven within the DNA of your culture.”

“It is just how we go about things,” said Kevin Clayton, the Cavs’ chief DEI officer, who, like most equity bureaucrats, is black, explained. “We believe that everybody in our organization, every person in our community, is part of our diversity, equity and inclusion story.”

What does that actually mean? According to their DEI website, the Cavs promise that “our team members at all levels mirror the demographics of the communities that we live and work in.”

The Cavs have 13 out of 17 black players making for a 76% black team in a half black city.

45.8% of Cleveland is black, 36% is white and 13% is Latino. To truly “mirror the demographics” of Cleveland, the Cavs will need to make some adjustments. The current number of 13 black players will have to be cut to 7.6 with a multiracial player like Ty Jerome serving as the ‘half’.

The Cleveland Cavaliers will have to get rid of 5 black players to make way for 2 new white players, 2 new Latino players and one part Asian/Indian/Eskimo player, and only then will they properly reflect the diversity of Cleveland and showcase the Cavs’ commitment to DEI.

More problematically, of the top 5 highest paid Cavs players, only 1 is white, and only 2 of the top 10, a state of affairs that would set off an outcry in most professions if it were reversed.

I contacted the Cavaliers about whether they had any plans to reshuffle their team roster in keeping with their DEI quotas they claim to live by without expecting an answer. 76% black representation concentrated at the highest salary tiers in an organization trying to ‘diversify’ lower-paying tiers where there are white employees and suppliers is not seen as an issue.

And that’s true for the entire NBA.

The NBA’s DEI office claims that its mission is “focused on ensuring that the NBA continues to have a diverse, equitable and inclusive mix of talent at all levels globally.”

“At all levels” is an interesting contention for an organization with 70% black players.

America, unlike Cleveland and the NBA, is 58% white, 13% black, 19% Latino, and 6% Asian.

To be in compliance with its DEI mandate, NBA teams will collectively need to jettison about 300 black players and hire around 200 white players to make black NBA players a minority and white players a majority. It will also have to bring in 90 Latino players not to mention Asian ones.

That would be absurd and yet such diversity quotas which prioritize race over merit abound. And the NBA and many of its teams have committed to those quotas at every other level except the one that is the most visible and the one that actually matters to the bottom line.

The NBA wants diversity everywhere but in the hands that dribble the ball. Mark Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks brag of having an executive leadership team that is “47% people of color”. The NBA claims that the fact that over half of its coaches are black is an achievement in diversity even though that level of racial disparity is at odds with both national and most local demographics.

DEI doesn’t actually seek equity let alone diversity. The profession of DEI tends to be every bit as diverse as the NBA’s team rosters and the NBA’s DEI professionals are no different. But the difference is that the NBA’s team rosters reward talent while DEI only rewards race.

Putting any metric ahead of performance on the court would lead to easily observable failure while DEI thrives by burying the failures of diversity inside large organizations where responsibility is harder to assign. DEI hires drag down every place they are in because of the simple fact that they were hired for reasons other than the only ones that matter in a workplace.

The NBA would be the perfect opportunity to showcase DEI in action.

Basketball fans should have to watch as averages drop and diversity players blow game after game while no one is allowed to mention the drastic decline in ability and performance.

The NBA has told us that it wants to set a DEI example for America. This is its opportunity to show everyone just how DEI works in the real world so that we never have to live with it again.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.