Stern had spent 30 years challenging the complexities of selling a sport — and largely succeeding — once largely perceived as much too black for the paying white folk. Through the phone, you could almost smell the smoke coming from Stern’s ears in response to the 2012 email from Levenson on how to broaden, or whiten, the team’s home crowds. But while forgoing comment, he agreed that more than being a sequel to the furor set off by Donald Sterling last spring, Levenson’s email was really part of a running commentary on the league’s marketing decisions and dilemmas in a culture neither Stern nor Silver would ever dare call postracial.

“We’ve gone from people objecting to Afros to people objecting to cornrows,” Stern said in 2011.

How many of those people are among the N.B.A.’s owners is impossible to say, but before condemning the league and demanding that its bankrollers be injected with truth serum, consider this question: If it is overrun by racist owners, how did the N.B.A. become, in the minds of the many who chronicle such things, the model sports league for its practices in hiring minorities, on the court and in front offices?

“The answer partially is that if you took the 120 or so pro sports owners and recognize they are among the wealthiest people and overwhelmingly white, there are going to be a few at least who have stereotypical images of blacks,” said Richard Lapchick, who has long studied and reported on diversity in sports.

Sports owners have avoided scrutiny for too long, he added, but he agreed that the N.B.A. should get the benefit of the doubt regarding its recent ownership news, “based on the excellent record it has had.”

Sterling, legally banished from the Los Angeles Clippers, was a longtime behavioral daredevil with a reasonably good chance of hastening his own destruction. Levenson was foremost trying to broaden the appeal of a franchise that for a whole lot of reasons — including Atlanta’s tepid support of all pro sports — has never been particularly vibrant.

Even while raging against “racist garbage” regarding the urban location of the team’s arena, Levenson contradictorily complained about the proportional blackness of the crowd, the cheerleaders, the music and other things.