Sloan Can't Hear the Warriors

     I see no evidence that he ever treated Amaechi any differently because he was gay than He would have treated him i if he had been straight.  Amaechi was always a journeyman player by NBA standards.  He probably rode the bench in 2002 solely for basketball reasons.  And He was traded away from Utah in 2002 not at clearance sale rates to get rid of him, but instead for Glen Rice, a player only two years removed from being the third best player on a the 67 win 2000 Lakers championship team who before that carried the Charloette Hornets, and who would still have been considered a valuable NBA commodity in 2002.  What will be exciting to see will be the reaction if a star player who is known to be Gay comes into the NBA.  As focused as the Utah front office is on winning basketball, and as good as people in this front office are at evaluating talent, I don't think they would pass up the chance to have such a player play for them,  (especially considering the great number of NBA players who do not want to play in Utah), (though like any team Utah can misevaluate young talent as has happened many times, including 12 times when Kobe Bryant fell to 13th in the 96 draft).  I hope that no team would pass on a gay player for any reason other than basketball talent, and when winning is as hard as it is in the NBA, at least consciously I don't think they would.  Preventing unconscious biases from interfering with judgement is simply a function of being good at what one does, and sometimes people with personal biases may do the best job of this.  I also think that having a player known to be gay on a team would help that team by sending the message that our focus is on winning basketball, to other players on that team, in the same way that nw types of diversity send this message in any organization.  It is actually more likely that a small city like SLC will be the first city with a player known to be gay, because the disadvantages small cities face force teams in those cities to look harder for new sources of talent than teams in big cities.  This has recently been seen in the benefits different teams have received from having foreign players.  Teams benefiting from foreign players have been disproportionately concentrated both in the western conference (leading to that conference's current advantage), and disproportionately concentrated in small cities, (especially in SLC, San Antonio, and Sacramento, three of the NBA's five NBA cities so small that they only have one major league sports team).  
     Also why single out Sloan.  Amaechi said that most NBA players had strong feelings against gay people, and Sloan is a former NBA player.  And anyway if Sloan shares these feelings he is smart enough to share them only with trusted colleagues so we will never know, and if he does not choose to share these thoughts with us, then we should be content to let them remain private, just as we should do with anyone.  (If we suspect that a person has feelings against homosexuals we can talk to that person about the dangers of slurring homosexuals, without knowing that person's private thoughts.)  
     btw I imagine that Sloan had the assignment of trying to guard Barry in the Warriors-Bulls 7 game series in 75.   Can anyone confirm this for me, and if he did try to guard Barry in that series, did Sloan have any success?