It’s official. Donald Sterling, the notorious former Los Angeles Clippers owner and downtown L.A. slumlord is out of the NBA, and the league, its owners, and partners can all breathe a sigh of relief. Court records this week indicate that Sterling botched his summer-long attempt to regain ownership of the Clippers by failing to petition the California Supreme Court on the matter of reversing its sale to Steve Ballmer.

According to Sports Illustrated’s Michael McCann, Sterling had 10 business days from Aug. 13 – the date an intermediate appellate court summarily rejected Sterling’s past petitions – to appeal the $2 billion sale of the Clippers.

With the Sterling threat behind the team, the former Microsoft CEO Ballmer’s first move was rewarding the man who worked the hardest at mitigating the backlash.

Rivers’ reward for being a good shepherd is a credit to him as a carpetbagging business man.

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There have been winners throughout since Sterling’s recorded conversations were leaked in April. Ballmer and his group get to own an NBA team, which they promise not to move to Seattle. Even if he’s not around to see the full value mature, Sterling stands to make an over 15,000 percent profit on the sale and wife Shelly Sterling, who according to reports brokered the sale, realizes her potential to be more than just a kept woman at age 80. But none have come out as successfully unscathed as Doc Rivers.

Since 2011, Major League Baseball has celebrated the contributions of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color barrier in baseball. However, it may surprise people to know that Robinson views his place in history differently. Despite what we are led to believe about change Robinson effected, he declared in his autobiography, “I know that I am a black man in a white world. I never had it made.”

Rivers, a respected coach leaguewide, brokered his way to Los Angeles last summer via trade between the Clippers and Boston Celtics. Upon Doc’s arrival, Sterling handed over the reigns of the organization and a three-year, $21 million contract to him. Doc coached the team to a 57-25 record, good for third in the Western Conference and home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. Meanwhile, Shelly was suing Sterling’s mistress V. Stiviano over gifts and private audio when one of Sterling’s taped conversations with Stiviano was leaked to TMZ and shit got real reality.

In the aftermath of the leaked audio filled with the Octogenarian’s racist gibberish, Clippers players were flooded with texts and calls from other players requesting that they take the lead in a public stance for all of them and not play. An opportunity to reshape professional basketball had been created and the Clippers found themselves as potential catalysts for a major metamorphosis.

The NBA Playoffs was the biggest sporting event going in late April and the media had already taken a sympathetic posture towards Clippers players. Ironically, they were the most equipped team to navigate through such an ordeal: not only did the team include Rivers – heralded as a leader and father figure by players around the league (of whom 78 percent are black), but their best player, Chris Paul, is the NBA Players Association President and the league’s premiere point guard.

“If Doc were to leave, that would be a disaster,” Clippers CEO Dick Parsons told reporters at the time. “Doc is the father figure of the team. Chris is the on-court captain of the team. But Doc is really the guy who leads the effort. He’s the coach, the grown-up, he’s a man of character and ability – not just in a basketball sense, but in the ability to connect with people and gain their trust. The team believes in him and admires and loves him. If he were to bail, with all the other circumstances, it would accelerate the death spiral.”

So in the only sport where the black man is the face of the league, Doc convinced everyone that he was the perfect person to handle such a delicate situation.

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The ball was in their court but a boycott would be bad for business to say the least and Sterling didn’t invest $21 million in Rivers and $107 million in Paul the previous offseason to be bad for business. Sterling, already a pariah of sponsors, was kept away from the team amid the firestorm. Rivers made certain that he became the face and voice of the franchise, convincing his players to forfeit their own. Paul in turn relinquished his responsibilities as NBAPA President to former player Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, and he and his Clippers teammates were kept away from media – a violation of NBA rules. What the team was allowed to do in protest – wear their warm ups inside out prior to the game – was a nonstarter.

The remaining 29 NBA owners, only one of which is Black, were cautious as Commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling for life and fined him $2.5 million – the maximum allowed. Even after the banning, Silver denied ever knowing Sterling’s history of racism until his most recent act went mainstream. Players immediately took to Twitter to applaud Silver and his symbolic banning although Sterling still owned the team. With the players appeased, and ownership vulnerable to whistleblowing, Doc leveraged the league’s reluctance against itself and acquired more clout, money and job security. He found it inappropriate for his players to boycott during the playoffs but more than acceptable to threaten it himself during contract negotiaitons. In the aftermath, the NBA returns to the status quo: a culture of black face/white ownership. The same culture that took men like Robinson and made them unchained slaves.