The NBA has received a grade of A+ for its racial hiring practices in 2013 from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics Director Richard Lapchick.
An internationally recognized expert on the role race plays in sports, Lapchick also gave the league a grade of B+ for gender hiring practices, culminating in a numerical grade of 90.7. Lapchick’s findings continued the NBA’s streak of leading all other men's professional sports leagues in hiring diversity.
“The NBA remains the industry leader among the men’s sports for racial and gender hiring practices,” Lapchick said in a press release. “No one else reaches the same points for race, gender or combined score.”
In the NBA league office, 35.7 percent of all professional employees are people of color and 41.1 percent are women. The league also had 44 women serving as vice presidents in the 2012-2013 season.
“When David Stern steps down as NBA Commissioner in 2014, among the legacies he will have created is an era in professional sport when leagues and teams hired the best people possible,” Lapchick added. He embraced the moral imperative for diversity while helping to show the other leagues that diversity is also a business imperative.”
Lapchick’s research also revealed nearly 47 percent of all league coaches were of color, including Miami Heat world champion coach Erik Spoelstra, who for the fifth straight year remained the NBA’s only head coach of Asian heritage.
In addition, the league set a record for assistant coaches of color at 45.6 percent. The percentage of people of color who held team professional administration positions increased by 3.1 percent to 27.6 percent, the highest percentage since the 2008-09 season.
Other highlights included such findings as African-Americans comprised 76.3 percent of all players and overall 81 percent of the players were of color. In addition, the percentage of women holding team professional administration positions remained virtually intact from the year before at stood at 35 percent.
The information used was taken from NBA team media guides as of the beginning of the 2012-2013 season. The listing of owners, head coaches, team presidents and general managers of color for the 2013 Report Card was then updated to reflect changes through the end of the 2012-2013 regular season.
TIDES, at the University of Central Florida, publishes the Racial and Gender Report Card to indicate areas of improvement, stagnation and regression in the racial and gender composition of professional and college sports personnel and to contribute to the improvement of integration in front office and college athletics department positions.
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