Don’t get me wrong: I like a good lifetime-ban-of-a-racist-NBA-owner as much as the next guy. Given the opportunity, I would have personally administered the suspension to Donald Sterling, the despicable not-for-long-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. And yet I’m having trouble seeing how NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s punishment of Sterling qualifies him for the hero worship so many are showering on him.

For one thing, as my colleague Marc Tracy wrote two days before Silver meted out justice, there’s just no way an overwhelmingly black, player-centric league can tolerate a racist owner. (I’d argue that it couldn’t tolerate a racist owner even if the players were all white, but that’s another story.) Silver should be commended for acting quickly and emphatically. But, when it comes to the decision rather than the manner in which he made it, he really had no choice.

More importantly, though, I don’t see how Silver and the NBA have remotely solved their race problem. If anything, the Sterling episode has only highlighted a deeper outrage: that the NBA is a majority-black league which no African-American has a plausible shot of governing.

As Marc points out, the real lesson of the past few days is that the commissioner isn’t quite the autocrat he appeared to be during the heavy-handed, 30-year reign of Silver’s predecessor, David Stern. With the NBA increasingly dependent on its stars to satisfy its spiraling revenue ambitions, the commissioner must achieve a measure of legitimacy in the eyes of the players. The league may be far from a democracy—the commissioner and the owners still have enormous power. But it can’t function without a kind of implicit consent of the governed. Even Stern—who at the height of his powers got away with such diktats as imposing an out-of-uniform dress code—discovered the limits of his authority in recent years, with players personally deciding when and who they would be traded to (Carmelo Anthony), and who else would be on their teams (LeBron James).

Now here’s the problem: If the NBA is more democratic than was widely appreciated before the Sterling episode, isn’t Adam Silver’s very presence a bit strange? I’m not talking about the way he was single-handedly anointed by his predecessor. (Though there is something creepily patrilineal about that. Stern worked at the same law firm as Silver’s father in the 1970s, which is how the young Adam Silver first got connected with his future patron.)