Report: Additional details surface on Danny Ferry phone call

The newest bit of information on the Danny Ferry-Bruce Levenson saga broke today, when Adrian Wojnarowski posted this exclusive look at Ferry’s now-infamous phone call, with Yahoo! Sports.

The piece is a must-read if you aren’t up to date on the entire situation, but even if you are the new details hit hard. According to Wojnarowski, Michael Gearon Jr. made an ownership power play during the meeting and Ferry’s racial comments might have been more than him simply reading from an outside report.

Here are a few nuggets from the story–but again, you should really check out the piece in its entireity:

"So now, Gearon had a notoriously impatient general manager on a conference call on a Friday afternoon, with owners whom sources say he didn’t respect or like; or in some cases, both. As it turned out, Gearon had the perfect storm for the beginning of the end for the Atlanta Hawks’ two most powerful figures: Levenson and Ferry."

Gearon clearly wasn’t happy with his standing in the organization and, according to Wojnarowski, had longed for Ferry’s departure for a long time. Still, Ferry brought all of this upon himself and also seems to have put more of his own opinions on then-free agent Luol Deng than he said he did in statement:

"Ferry’s clinging to the story that the racially charged words belonged to someone else – that a riff connecting Africans to a con man stereotype weren’t his words at all. In context of the transcripts, it appears that those had been Ferry’s own interjections on the call, somehow supporting the intel culled outside of the Hawks."

Wojnarowski sums up the entire situation nicely in a paragraph near the end of the story:

"In all the twisted wreckage of these Hawks, make no mistake: Gearon is no whistle-blowing hero for racial justice, just as Ferry is no victim for falling into the trap."

The Atlanta Hawks are in a bad place right now, and this situation is going to haunt them for some time to come, but as more and more information continues to come out it seems more and more likely that Danny Ferry’s time with the Hawks is drawing to an end.

The organization has stood behind him up until this point and claims that he is “still the GM” but the question now should be: For how much longer?