I find it ironic that he was fined $75k for this comment conveniently after Jason Collins made his declaration about his sexual preferences.  Much worse has been said in post-game pressers, one-on-one interviews, etc. with little to no response.  This is an attempt to further the agenda to have openly gay athletes in professional sports - which I'm totally fine with.  However, I feel his fine would  have been much lower if in fact Jason Collins had not come out.

This is a huge problem I have with Professional Sports and their discipline system - very subjective, non-even-handed use of fines as a bludgeon at the discretion of the leagues' "Czars" of discipline.

Would be nice if they had some sort of structure, or rhyme or reason to the fines, e.g. $xxxx for doing this, $yyyy for doing that...not "We're going to fine you whatever we want AND we own the appeals board so just accept the fine and walk away."

And even more so because he said it at a postgame presser.

If somebody takes offense at something i say in private, maybe I've damaged the relationship and my own reputation. But if I step up to a microphone after being introduced as a representative of Company X it's a whole different story. There wouldn't be a fine, per se, but that would be sitting in my performance record for years, interfering with raises and promotions and job opportunities, and I suspect that relative to our respective salaries the eventual financial damage would work out at least as bad as Hibbert's $75k.

To his credit, Hibbert seems to have figured things out pretty quickly and his apology seemed completely genuine to me (they usually don't). Between the fine and the apology I don't think any damage was done to the brand at all this time around.

Not defending the comments or the usage of the phrase at all, but to play semantics devil's advocate, it's different because in your example, you're saying that being gay is bad, like being grounded. You're equating someone's sexual orientation with a negative consequence or situation. In the example of "no homo," you're not explicitly making any normative statement about homosexuality. You're not saying it's bad or good or anything. It's meant, generally in a comical sense, to clarify that what you said wasn't meant to sound sexual, and in particular homosexual. The parallel to your above scenario would be something like saying "I love Eddie Vedder, no homo." You're saying "no homo" as a way of clarifying that you aren't romantically in love with the lead singer of Pearl Jam.

One could argue that by going out of your way to clarify that you aren't romantically in love with a guy or that you weren't "stretched" sexually, you're implying that there's something wrong with it, since it needs such explicit clarification.

I think it's a stupid phrase and I get why it is offensive, but to me, it's not the same as equating negatively homosexuality with "badness" (that's gay) or blatantly calling someone a slur (you're a f*g).

I think "that's gay" is more offensive.

I first learned about no homo from 4chan's /fit/ board back in 2009 and 2010. People would post pics of their progress or current bodies and others would give feedback, which if positive or especially glowing, was often post-scripted with no homo. It was not considered offensive because it is 4chan and most posts on those types of boards go for brevity, but also because there is no negative association with homosexuality, other than the possible negative interpretation of the word "homo."

There's a difference between a private conversation between 2 friends and a post-game press conference, which if you are a professional athlete is comparable to a business meeting for most of us.  I'm pretty sure if I uttered the phrase "No homo" in a business meeting, the company I work for would not be happy.

Also, consider this: Substitute a racial or ethnic slur for "homo"...  I think the penalty would be at least as severe.