Rapper Common Praises NBA For Dropping ‘Owner’ Title: ‘Nobody Owns Us’

The push by several NBA teams to remove the title “owner” from the person who purchases and manages the team has earned the praise of social justice warrior and the wokest of woke rapper, Common.

Speaking with TMZ Sports, the politically outspoken performer said the term owner “never sat right with me.”

“I’m so pleased,” Common told the outlet. “The term owner — it didn’t sit right with me. The history of what we have and we are as black people in this country … it’s just not really being considerate of the history.”

The new terms that some NBA teams have adopted are “Managing Partner” and “Chairman.”

Common especially appreciated NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for referring to one team’s majority investor as “governor” instead of “owner.”

“Nobody owns us,” Common said. “These men are professionals.”

As The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti reported, the term “owner” is actually colloquial and has never been an official term of the NBA, which officially refers to such men and women as governors.

“The term owner, TMZ says, is actually colloquial,” Zanotti reported. “The NBA, which says it isn’t pressuring league executives to find a better way to describe themselves, refers to ‘owners’ as ‘governors,’ and the collection of NBA owners as the ‘Board of Governors’ of the National Basketball Association.”

Controversy over the use of the word “owner” erupted in 2018 when the Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green told the HBO sports show, “The Shop,” that he found the term racially insensitive, evoking images of plantation owners, given the predominance of black players in the NBA.

“You shouldn’t say owner,” Green said. “When you think of a basketball team, nobody thinks of the f***in’ Golden State Warriors and think of that damn bridge. They think of the players that make that team … you don’t even know what the f*** [the bridge] is called.”

“When your product is purely the labor of people, then owner sounds like something that is of a feudal nature,” added commentator Jon Stewart.

Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors made that claim while sitting on a net worth of $30 million, meaning he has fully enjoyed the fruits of his labors on behalf of the team’s owner.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban vehemently disagrees with the language change, noting that the owner actually does own the team beyond just managerial decisions.

“For him to try to turn it into something it’s not is wrong,” Cuban told ESPN. “He owes the NBA an apology. I think he does, because to try to create some connotation that owning equity in a company that you busted your ass for is the equivalent of ownership in terms of people, that’s just wrong. That’s just wrong in every which way.”

Cuban continued: “People who read that message and misinterpret it — make it seem like we don’t do everything possible to help our players succeed and don’t care about their families and don’t care about their lives, like hopefully we do for all of our employees — that’s just wrong.”