David Stern, 1942-2020

The problem with holding a role for a long time is that, no matter how good your intentions, mistakes happen. And, as Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Which led to William Shakespeare writing, "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones."

David Joel Stern on September 22, 1942, in Manhattan, and grew up in Teaneck, Bergen County, New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1963, having been a member of RU's Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, or "Sammy." He got his law degree from Columbia University in just 3 years.

He got a job at the law firm of Proskauer, Rose, Goet & Mendelsohn, which represented the NBA. He was the man who negotiated the 1976 semi-merger between the NBA and the ABA, which also allowed free agency in the league for the first time.

In 1978, he left Proskauer Rose, and accepted Commissioner Larry O'Brien's offer to be the NBA's General Counsel, the league's top lawyer. In 1980, O'Brien put him in charge of marketing, television and public relations. Arguably, this made him more powerful than O'Brien himself.

At the time, the NBA was seen by white America as a black man's league, with a terrible drug problem. Stern made it the 1st of the "big four" leagues with a drug testing policy. He also instituted a salary cap, but with a revenue-sharing program that made him popular with the players.

He also fixed the television situation. On May 16, 1980, the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 6 of the Finals to win the NBA Championship. If you wanted to watch this game live, you had to be in The Spectrum in Philadelphia. It didn't air on TV until CBS showed it on tape delay at 11:30 PM.

For a 34-year-old league with pretensions to being major, already having stars like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Julius Erving, and a pair of rookies named Earvin "Magic" Johnson (who took control of that game in the place of the injured Kareem) and Larry Bird, and with teams from 2 of the 5 biggest markets in the country playing each other in the Finals, that was inexcusable. Stern worked with CBS to get a better contract, and the money poured in for all.

On February 1, 1984, O'Brien retired as Commissioner, and, in a move that surprised no one, Stern was elected to replace him. He held the job for the next 30 years. It's just a coincidence that Michael Jordan made his debut 9 months after Stern took the job -- and so did 3 other future Hall-of-Famers: Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley and John Stockton -- but it might seem to some that Stern taking the job was the conception of the NBA as we know it today, and Jordan's debut was the birth.

Indeed, there are 3 men who are responsible for the growth of the NBA into what it is today:

* James Naismith, who invented the sport in 1891, and made it popular on America's college campuses.
* Ned Irish, the Madison Square Garden official who, in 1934, began staging college basketball doubleheaders there, often including games between teams from different parts of the country, expanding national interest in the college game; and then, in 1946 being among the founders of the NBA as owner of the Garden-based New York Knickerbockers and running them until 1974, helping to establish pro basketball as here to stay, and largely keeping it going until a Stern-like figure could follow. And...
* David Stern, who arrived in 1978 at a 22-team league with poor TV coverage that left it a distant 3rd behind MLB and the NFL, and arguably less popular than the college game; and in 2014 left a 30-team league that was, around the world, more popular than any league, in any sport, with the sole exception of English soccer's Premier League. (No, not Spain's La Liga: Real Madrid and Barcelona are popular worldwide, but the rest of that league is not.)

It wasn't just in basketball that Stern had influence. He wanted to see the NBA stars in the Olympics. So he pushed the International Olympic Committee to finally end "shamateurism": The idea that Communist countries could have state-sponsored athletes, professional in all but name, while the world's free countries had to keep their athletes amateur or the athletes -- not the countries themselves -- would be banned from amateur competitions in all those sports where there were few, if any, professional competitions at all.

This led to the "Dream Team" that plowed through the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. There were 12 players. Only Duke star Christian Laettner had yet to play a pro game, and only Laettner has yet to be elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Everybody else involved, save for assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo, has been elected: Johnson, Bird, Jordan, Barkley, Stockton, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Scottie Pippen, Clyde Drexler, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin, head coach Chuck Daly, and assistant coaches Mike Krzyzewski and Lenny Wilkens (who has been elected both as a player and as a coach). In fact, of those players, only Laettner and Mullin were not named to the NBA's 50th Anniversary 50 Greatest Players in 1996.

Look at the results of that 1992 Dream Team. We have had NBA superstars from Europe, such as Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis from the Soviet Union/Lithuania, Vlade Divac from Yugoslavia/Serbia, Drazen Petrovic from Yugoslavia/Croatia, Dirk Nowitzki from Germany, Tony Parker from France, Pau and Marc Gasol from Spain, Giannis Antetokounmpo from Greece and Luka Doncic from Slovenia; from Africa, such as Olajuwon from Nigeria, Dikembe Mutombo from Zaire/Congo, Luol Deng from South Sudan and Joel Embiid from Cameroon; from South America, such as Manu Ginobili from Argentina; from Asia, such as Yao Ming from China; from Australia, such as Luc Longley, Andrew Bogut and Ben Simmons.

As for the growth of the teams: It has gone both ways. The Orlando Magic (1989) established a market that had not previously been home to an NBA or an ABA team. The San Diego Clippers (1978), the Minnesota Timberwolves (1989), the Toronto Raptors (1995), the New Orleans Hornets (2002, became the Pelicans in 2012) and the Charlotte Bobcats (2004, awarded the Hornets name in 2013) entered markets that had lost an NBA team.

The Clippers, the T-Wolves, the Pelicans, the Utah Jazz (1979), the Dallas Mavericks (1980), the Miami Heat (1988), the Charlotte Hornets (1988) and the Memphis Grizzlies (2001) were put in markets that had lost an ABA team.

Furthermore, he managed to prevent the abandonment of New Orleans for Oklahoma City (except as a temporary post-Hurricane Katrina home) by the Hornets in 2006, and of Sacramento for Anaheim by the Kings in 2012. In addition to helping Sacramento swing a new arena that guarantees the team's long-term ensconcement, he helped Atlanta save the Hawks and Milwaukee save the Bucks with new arenas.

But several teams, under Stern's tenure (counting back to his 1978 arrival, not just to his 1984 accession as Commissioner) moved, and have not been replaced. The Buffalo Braves became the San Diego Clippers in 1978, and then the Los Angeles Clippers in 1984. The Kansas City Kings became the Sacramento Kings in 1985. The Vancouver Grizzlies moved to Memphis in 2001. The Seattle SuperSonics became the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2008.

And, while they stayed in the same market, the New Jersey Nets became the Brooklyn Nets in 2012, while the Golden State Warriors moved back across San Francisco Bay from Oakland to San Francisco in 2019.

As the 2020s have dawned, neither Buffalo, nor San Diego, nor Kansas City, nor Memphis, nor Seattle, nor New Jersey, nor Oakland has returned to the NBA.

Was passing a new minimum age of 19 for players entering the NBA, and prohibiting them from being drafted out of high school, a good thing? It does give them an extra year to polish their skills and, hopefully, gain maturity. But it also led to "one and done": One year of college, in which basketball is primary and education is, at most, secondary. College basketball really does get treated as the NBA's minor league, as opposed to the G-League, or the D-League, or whatever the hell that's called now.

But Stern could also be a tyrant. He locked the players out twice, canceling the starts of the 1998-99 and 2011-12 seasons, and very nearly the entire seasons. This kind of behavior may have inspired Gary Bettman, who essentially held Stern's old job with the NBA from 1981 to 1993, to be a dick with labor negotiations once he became Commissioner of the NHL, and cancel the entire 2004-05 season in order to break the players' union and institute a salary cap.

On his show Real Sports, Bryant Gumbel said Stern was acting like "some kind of modern-day plantation overseer." He may have been referring to the one-and-done rule, and a 2005 dress code that banned players from wearing headphones, chains, shorts, sleeveless shirts, sunglasses and baseball caps during officially-NBA-sanctioned public appearances.

Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers -- you might remember him wearing a whacked-out version of a Boston Red Sox cap during his famed "We talkin' 'bout practice" press conference, in 2002, 3 years before the code came into effect -- saw what Gumbel saw, saying, "They're targeting guys who dress like me, guys who dress hip-hop." Which leads me to think that, if he could have found a way to enforce it, Stern would have banned tattoos from the league with by far the most exposed skin.

There was also a perception that Stern tried to fix league results. In 1985, the Knicks, the team he grew up rooting for, ended up with the 1st pick in the NBA's Draft Lottery, in a year when the top pick was expected to be Ewing, who was being hailed as one of the greatest players in the history of college basketball. People who hated the Knicks (or, at least, New York) had a fit. And Knick fans began talking about not if Ewing would lead them to an NBA Championship, but how many. The answer turned out to be none.

But Stern did seem to favor certain teams. Michael Jordan became his meal ticket; then, the Lakers of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant; then, LeBron James. Here's one way of looking at Stern's tenure: NBA Championships won:

Los Angeles Lakers, 8: 1985, 1987, 1988, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2010.
Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan, 6: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 1998.
San Antonio Spurs, 5: 1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2011. (2014 came after Stern retired.)
Teams with Shaquille O'Neal on them, 4: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2006.
Boston Celtics, 3: 1984, 1986, 2008.
Detroit Pistons, 3: 1989, 1990, 2004.
Miami Heat, 3: 2006, 2012, 2013.
Houston Rockets, 2: 1994, 1995.
Teams with LeBron James on them, 2: 2012, 2013.
Dallas Mavericks, 1: 2011.
Chicago Bulls without Michael Jordan, in their entire history, none.

And the officiating, good grief. Jordan was more of a travelin' man than Ricky Nelson. And the Lakers were practically gifted their 2000, '01 and '02 titles by the referees. As Sacramento fans about the 2002 Western Conference Finals sometime.

Then again, the Knicks still haven't won a title since 1973. And LeBron's Finals record, including after Stern's retirement, is 3-6.

Stern retired in 2014, handing the job over to his deputy, Adam Silver, a move approved by the league owners. Retired from an active role in basketball, he thus became eligible for the Basketball Hall of Fame, and was elected later that year.

Stern was married to the former Dianne Bock, and they had 2 sons, Eric and Andrew.

On December 12, 2019, David Stern suffered a brain hemorrhage, and underwent emergency surgery at a Manhattan hospital. It was not successful, and he died on January 1, 2020, at the age of 77.

It is possible to look at his entire record, and view him favorably. But that entire record shows some unpleasant things that can't be ignored. Was he one of the great men of sports, not just his own sport? As with the men usually considered the greatest league bosses in their respective sports, Kenesaw Mountain Landis in MLB, Pete Rozelle in the NFL, and Clarence Campbell in the NHL, the answer has to be, "Yes, but... "