I am a firm believer that the NBA would be better overall without Sterling. He's a racist and needs to go. But so does a homophobe like DeVoes.
That said, I don't see that Sterling's comments have caused undue economic distress on the league as much it has his own team. I believe the league is disguising a moral stance on racist comments by Sterling in a package of possible economic ramifications to get the outcome they want from the moral perspective. If they could have thrown him out just for the racist comments they would have but they can't. They have to show it has broken NBA by laws and contracts, financial stuff.
So if they are going to take the moral ground and do the right thing with Sterling, they should do the right thing with all owners that have counter current societal views, such as racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. If they want to wrap those proceedings in a blanket of excuses about possible lost money for the league as a whole, go ahead and do it. But what you do for one issue, they should do for all issues or none at all.
Just the way I see it.