In April, as the scandal involving the Clippers owner Donald Sterling made headlines, many of Sterling’s fellow-owners issued stern condemnations. Mark Cuban, the tech millionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said that, while Sterling’s comments were “wrong” and “abhorrent,” he wasn’t convinced that Sterling should be forced out of the league. “I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do,” he said. “It’s a very, very slippery slope.”

Later, after the N.B.A. commissioner Adam Silver announced that he had suspended Sterling for life and would force him to sell the team, Cuban tweeted his full support of the decision. (Silver’s decision wasn’t unprecedented: Major League Baseball banned the Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott from taking part in team operations in 1993, and again between 1996 and 1998, as punishment for a string of offensive remarks she made about Jews, African-Americans, and Asians.) Yet Cuban’s basic discomfort with the premise of the N.B.A. punishing someone for his private statements seems to remain. On Wednesday, Cuban expanded on his earlier comments about Sterling in a video conversation with Inc. magazine:

Most of the attention has been paid to Cuban’s candid discussion of his own prejudices—and of his examples of people he crosses the street to avoid. But it is worth considering what Cuban says, a moment earlier in the interview, about the progress that has been made by minority communities in America: “We’ve come a long way, and with that progress comes a price. We’re a lot more vigilant, and we’re a lot less tolerant of different views. And it’s not necessarily easy for everybody to adapt, or evolve.”

The word that stands out here is “price,” as if by working toward a more inclusive and tolerant society we have lost something important. But just what might that be? The right for people to lean on archaic religious arguments to excuse modern injustices toward gay people? Or for Donald Sterling to reserve the right to go on living in some combination of the eighteen-fifties and the nineteen-fifties? Perhaps some people are allowed to say less today, but many people are finally free to say more. For much of the history of sports, African-American athletes who advocated for civil rights were branded as troublemakers; gay athletes kept silent rather than risk their jobs by speaking about the people they loved. Jackie Robinson, famously, was told that if he wanted to be the first black major leaguer he had to take the abuse hurled from the stands in silence. He had to be far more “vigilant” than Cuban or anyone else must be today.

Still, Cuban’s comments come at a time when the major American professional-sports leagues have become especially active in monitoring the speech of their employees, and, at times, punishing them for what they say. On May 10th, after Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be drafted by an N.F.L. team and was shown kissing his boyfriend when he received the news, Don Jones, of the Miami Dolphins, tweeted “OMG” and “horrible.” He promptly deleted the tweets, but not before they’d been spotted. The Dolphins quickly fined Jones, excused him from the team, and required that he attend sensitivity training. He apologized to Sam, as well as to his own organization, and has since been reinstated. Miami’s swift response was likely spurred by its recognition that everyone in the N.F.L. would be under intense scrutiny after Sam was drafted, and by the memory of the franchise’s own recent sordid, public shame.

Last season, Jonathan Martin left the team because of a sustained regime of bullying led by Richie Incognito and several other Dolphins veterans. An independent report introduced the wider world to the kind of talk that went on in the Miami locker room: a word salad of homophobic, racist, threatening language that exceeded even the worst suspicions that we may have had about jock talk. Incognito was suspended by the Dolphins for three months, and is now a free agent. Earlier in the same season, Riley Cooper, a receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles, was caught on camera at a Kenny Chesney concert saying that he would “fight every nigger here.” The video spread widely online, and Cooper was fined, suspended for two days, and made—as is the pattern—to attend sensitivity training.

The N.F.L. announced this winter that it was considering adding a new rule to its games which would penalize a team fifteen yards for unsportsmanlike conduct if a player was heard using the N-word during a game. The proposal never came to a vote, but it suggested that the league was serious enough about punishing hate speech that it would police it not only on the Internet but also on the field. Al Sharpton called it a “good first step.” Michael Wilbon, a sportswriter, disagreed on his show “Pardon the Interruption”: “So you’re gonna have a league with no black owners and a white commissioner—middle-aged and advanced-aged white men—say to black players, mostly, (because that’s what we’re talking about) ‘You can’t use the N-word on the field of play, or we’re gonna penalize you.’ ” Wilbon’s point was similar to some of the most forceful responses to the current Sterling affair—that worrying about words obfuscates the real problems of racial inequality in professional sports. In the N.B.A., seventy-six per cent of the players are African-American, versus only one of the thirty-one owners who will decide Donald Sterling’s fate in June: Michael Jordan. (Jordan’s candid discussion of his own prejudices as a student in North Carolina appears in a new book: “I considered myself a racist at the time. Basically, I was against all white people.”)

But words still matter, and when they’re spoken by athletes who occupy an elevated position in America’s sports culture they can be transformative. In 2011, Kobe Bryant was fined a hundred thousand dollars for calling a referee “a fucking faggot.” A month later, Joakim Noah, of the Chicago Bulls, was fined fifty grand after he was heard using the word. The league’s crackdown served as a vital cultural model, and fans received a clear message: it is not acceptable to speak this way.

Was the N.B.A. enlightened, or was it simply worried about the bottom line? The answer might not matter: by making the issue of gay slurs a serious one, the association spurred a national conversation, and it surely made some kid in a pickup game somewhere think of a different word to use. Bryant filmed a P.S.A. in support of gay rights, and, two years later, he could be seen calling his fans out on Twitter for using gay slurs. Had he undergone a change of heart, or was he simply towing a new company line? That might not matter much, either.

In the interview on Wednesday, Cuban was asked if there was a way to keep bigotry out of the N.B.A. No, he said. “There’s no law against stupid.” But there’s no reason not to hold players and owners to a higher standard. The crackdown by pro leagues on offensive speech may generate concerns about the rights of players, or about the reflexive nature of the kind of group outrage that's fostered by the Internet. Some of these concerns are legitimate. But a corporation making its employees responsible for the things they say can have a sweeping impact when it happens to be a corporation that has millions of fans.

After Michael Sam was drafted, ESPN asked an unnamed player on the Rams if the team’s show of support had been genuine or merely an example of political correctness. “Clearly, I’m not sure how everyone feels,” the player said. “But, from what I can tell so far, I think it’s a little bit of both, honestly.” If half of the players on the St. Louis Rams are just being politically correct when they say that they accept Michael Sam’s sexuality, they are also, not inconsequentially, modelling correct behavior. The more that fans hear them say it, the more likely they are to consider their own prejudices. And, the more that the players hear themselves say it, the more likely they are to think about it, too.

Above: Mark Cuban at the Staples Center in Los Angeles; January 15, 2014. Photograph by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE/Getty.