It only took the league 33 years.

Sterling bought the Clippers in 1981 and has been a blight on the N.B.A. ever since. It’s only now — just as the Clippers are making a rare cameo in the playoff spotlight — that the league has pledged to punish its troublesome owner.

When the Clippers were losing, which they did for 27 of Sterling’s years there, the league tacitly accepted Sterling’s well-documented racism and other flaws. For decades it was perfectly acceptable to let him run his team like “a Southern plantationlike structure,” as the former Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor once charged in a lawsuit. Sterling routinely operated below the radar, so what was there to worry about?

Only now, after an illicit recording obtained by the gossip site TMZ.com caught someone who is said to be Sterling saying that he did not want his friend associating with black people and did not even want blacks at his games, and after team sponsors began to flee en masse because of the recording, the N.B.A. decided that enough was enough.

One of the most distressing parts of the revelations might have been that they did not come as a complete surprise. A string of lawsuits against Sterling over the years — for housing discrimination, for sexual harassment, for failing to pay employees — was not enough to pique the N.B.A.’s interest in disciplining him. A claim in one lawsuit said Sterling did not like Hispanics as tenants because all they did was “smoke and drink and just hang around the building.” A 2009 federal discrimination lawsuit led to a $2.76 million settlement, widely reported to be the largest amount paid in such a suit.

Did the N.B.A. and its team owners somehow miss that news? Or did they just ignore it and hope others would too because, after all, the Clippers were usually so bad that no one really cared what they did?