Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling has agreed to allow his wife to negotiate the basketball team’s forced sale, TMZ and ESPN reported Friday.
Sources with knowledge of the situation told ESPN that Shelly Sterling and her lawyers have been negotiating with the NBA since commissioner Adam Silver banned her husband from the league for life in April. Silver also planned to urge the league’s board of governors to force Donald Sterling to sell the Clippers.
Shelly Sterling reportedly has equal ownership of the team under a family trust, and earlier this month she argued that she was legally entitled to keep the team even if the NBA forced her husband out of the league.
Sterling’s attorney, Pierce O’Donnell, wouldn’t comment on the negotiations to TMZ but did say “Shelly Sterling’s preference has always been to find a way to resolve this dispute amicably with the NBA in a mutually satisfactory manner.”