RIP David Stern

ifmanis5

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Rotten Apple

BigSoxFan

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If he dies, his estate better give the stolen Reggie Lewis cap money back to the Celtics.
 

Soxy

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Eh. Gallows humor when somebody dies has been a part of SoSH for as long as I can remember. Everybody copes differently.
 

McBride11

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Per ESPN scroll - Stern has died now.
Im sure those better at the twitter can cite better.

Condolences to his family
 

richgedman'sghost

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Shame on me. I expected to click on this forum and see at least a little retrospective on David Stern. Since my youth was in the 1980s, I always considered him the best commissioner of the 4 major sports as I am too young to really remember Pete Rozelle. I know Stern's star diminished somewhat in his later years (moving the Sonics to OKC and the Tim Donaghy scandal) but still to have no real comments is shocking.
I realize that SOSH is known for its mocking of the dead and I appreciate that but sometimes I think that the mockery should be balanced by some analysis of the man. I mean this is not Bettman or Goodell two men well deserving of the all the mockery they get.
 

luckiestman

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Shame on me. I expected to click on this forum and see at least a little retrospective on David Stern. Since my youth was in the 1980s, I always considered him the best commissioner of the 4 major sports as I am too young to really remember Pete Rozelle. I know Stern's star diminished somewhat in his later years (moving the Sonics to OKC and the Tim Donaghy scandal) but still to have no real comments is shocking.
I realize that SOSH is known for its mocking of the dead and I appreciate that but sometimes I think that the mockery should be balanced by some analysis of the man. I mean this is not Bettman or Goodell two men well deserving of the all the mockery they get.
A little bit snowflake-ish by you... a little bit

View: https://twitter.com/espn/status/1212482112135278597?s=20
 

jon abbey

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Shame on me. I expected to click on this forum and see at least a little retrospective on David Stern. Since my youth was in the 1980s, I always considered him the best commissioner of the 4 major sports as I am too young to really remember Pete Rozelle. I know Stern's star diminished somewhat in his later years (moving the Sonics to OKC and the Tim Donaghy scandal) but still to have no real comments is shocking.
I realize that SOSH is known for its mocking of the dead and I appreciate that but sometimes I think that the mockery should be balanced by some analysis of the man. I mean this is not Bettman or Goodell two men well deserving of the all the mockery they get.
What is this post? You made the second post after he died, if there's no glowing retrospective of his life and you think there should be, write one yourself instead of giving other people a hard time for not doing so quickly enough for your taste.

Personally my impression of him was that he was a smug asshole, but that was his job basically, so good job? I can't say I've given too much thought to it but I would say that basically all commissioners in all sports over the course of my lifetime are fairly interchangeable, some of them are better at their jobs and some are worse but I can't think of one who I actually care about as a person.
 

BigSoxFan

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I mean, the guy got rid of a huge ref gambling scandal in like 0.02 seconds. I know this was during Spygate and Michael Vick but I’m still amazed at how little people cared about the Donaghy stuff.
 

Pandemonium67

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I wasn't a Sonics fan myself, but I know a bunch of people who consider him one of the team-stealing vandals.

"Everyone knows the story of how David Stern aided the stealing of the Supersonics from Seattle. He was slighted by Frank Chopp and that was enough for him to write off Seattle forever as an NBA town. ... With a smug smile and a dismissive wave of his hand Seattle was left in his rear view mirror forever.

{snip}

"Stern knew this was going to be the final time he would have all the microphones from Seattle in front of him and he wanted to stick that dagger into our hearts just one more time and twist."


Thieves
 

Big John

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The late Reggie Lewis offers his posthumous condolences. Can we finally get our cap relief now, David?
 

mauf

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It is exceedingly rare for a CEO who is not a founder to stay at the helm of an organization for more than a decade and have that be a good thing for the organization.

If David Stern had stepped down as NBA Commissioner in 1994, he’d be a legend.
 

ifmanis5

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Guy got handed Larry, Magic and Jordan on a silver platter and ended up being a dick about player tatoos and wardrobe rules. You could make a decent case he's a massively overrated and petty liar. But not today, RIP.
 

InstaFace

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What is this post? You made the second post after he died, if there's no glowing retrospective of his life and you think there should be, write one yourself instead of giving other people a hard time for not doing so quickly enough for your taste.
Seriously, the entitlement is enough to power some small cities. WAHHH YOU HAVENT WRITTEN THE POST I WANTED FAST ENOUGH, GET TYPING, PEONS!

I met David Stern once, as he was a trustee of my school while I went there. Just came to a group of 30 or so sports fans in a classroom and held forth on whatever someone asked about basketball, sports, business, whatever. He was the sitting commissioner at the time and was speaking frankly and at length about stuff that, really, he probably shouldn't have been so forthcoming with. But there were no reporters in the room (he asked a couple times!), so he just said whatever he thought. Had some very deep thoughts about how pro sports should better society, how to run an organization that genuinely cares about its people top to bottom, labor relations, the whole deal. Seemed like a very nice guy.

He also clearly chose the best successor out of all his contemporaries. A life well lived, we should all be so lucky.
 

Sam Ray Not

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"Under Stern’s leadership, the league’s owners locked players out four times in 16 years, with two of those forced stoppages wiping out months of games, all in favor of goosing owners’ profit margins and establishing beyond doubt who controlled the NBA."

https://www.theringer.com/nba/2020/1/1/21045783/david-stern-obituary-nba-commissioner
This is a great, nuanced piece, imho. Devine and his Ringer cohort Rob Mahoney may be my two favorite hoops analysts these days.
 
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richgedman'sghost

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It is exceedingly rare for a CEO who is not a founder to stay at the helm of an organization for more than a decade and have that be a good thing for the organization.

If David Stern had stepped down as NBA Commissioner in 1994, he’d be a legend.
I agree 100 % with this viewpoint and tried to allude to it in my original post. If Stern had stepped aside in 1994 before the Jordan gambling scandal, the Donaghy scandal and the Seattle relocation, he would have been viewed much differently. He lost his fastball and succumbed more to the owners interests in the latter part of his reign
 

InstaFace

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This is a great, nuanced piece, imho. Devine and his Ringer cohort Rob Mahoney may be my two favorite hoops analysts these days.
Yes, it is, and everyone should read it.

There's a much humbler recap from Marc Spears (the interviewer whose video was linked above), and it doesn't add much to that Ringer article, but it does highlight two things that article gives over-brief service to:

INTRODUCING THE DREAM TEAM
Stern encouraged NBA stars, such as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird to play on what would be called “The Dream Team” during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. It was USA Basketball’s first team made up of professional players.

“The Dream Team ignited interest in basketball around the world,” Stern said in August. “I would say that prior to the ’92 Barcelona Olympics we had about 80 countries that were showing NBA basketball. Today, there are 215 countries showing NBA basketball. And you can see the chart and the graph that follows the Dream Team. You could say you saw Charles Barkley elbow the Angolan player, and then you can watch Charles play for Phoenix, or Houston, or wherever he was playing.

“And we began marketing the NBA to countries that were getting it from the Olympics. And actually, China had the Olympics in 2008, and when Yao Ming led the Chinese team against the US, I think it still is the most watched basketball game in the history of the world.”

The Dream Team made the world fall in love with the game. Several former international NBA stars, including Germany’s Dirk Nowitzki, France’s Tony Parker and Argentina’s Manu Ginobili were influenced by watching The Dream Team on television as children.

Entering this season, the NBA featured 108 international players.


GROWING THE GAME GLOBALLY
In 1989, Stern stood outside the Chinese Central Television offices in Beijing for four hours until he got a meeting. He next convinced CCTV to air NBA games initially for free. Today, 18 million fans are watching NBA games in China. Last July, Tencent and the NBA announced a five-year extension through the 2024-25 season paying $1.5 billion.

The rest of the world eventually followed China on NBA viewership, as the 2019 NBA Finals were shown live in 215 countries in 50 languages. The NBA also now has offices internationally in Hong Kong, Manila, Toronto, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, London, Madrid, Mumbai, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg thanks to Stern’s influence.

“We’ve worked with cities to help them understand what they needed in buildings,” Stern said. “We’ve opened up academies there, and under Commissioner Silver there are four or five academies all over the world. In India, in China, Latin America, etc. And it’s very exciting. And now they’re about to open a league in Africa, the Basketball Africa League, which I think is a terrific opportunity.”

The NBA will debut its Basketball Africa League in March.
He worked real hard to bring his game to a global audience, moreso than the NFL or even MLB can really say (MLB's happy that they play baseball in Japan and Latin America, but hasn't really seemed to care). Basketball is the third-most popular sport in the world, behind only association football and cricket, and the notion of that was absolutely laughable back when he first took the job. The NBA was a sideshow, as that Ringer article relates. If I told you today that ultimate frisbee was going to take the world by storm and 30 years from now would be one of the most popular sports anywhere, you'd call my local police department to do a wellness check. But Stern started from not much farther ahead than ultimate is at today, and that's exactly what he wrought.

You can criticize the lockouts (particularly the 2011 one), but his tenure pretty uniformly lifted all boats and succeeded in just about every dimension that you can define "success" with. Most commissioners are interchangeably dull politicians, like Jon Abbey said. But there's a tier that includes Rozelle and Happy Chandler, men in those seats who really did make a difference, and Stern belongs among them.
 

Kliq

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Interesting to see a lot of people settling on Stern's faults. Stern made mistakes as commissioner, but considering how long he was in that job, it is hard to realistically say that someone could have done a better job. It is easy to armchair quarterback the whole thing, but a lot of that hand-wringing about lockouts and franchises moving sort of ignores the reality that the job is to make money for the owners, so there always going to be some things motivated by greed and profits and not out of the kindness of his heart.

People dismissing Stern's success growing the game because he was fortunate enough to have Magic/Bird/Jordan need to go back and understand what the league was like back when he first took charge. In particular, look at the reign of Larry O'Brien. Let's just say that the words "innovator" or "progressive" were not mentioned in the first paragraph of his obituary. Yeah, it was great to have those stars, but the league had plenty of marketable stars before them (Cousy, Wilt, Baylor, West, Dr. J, etc.) and look where they were. Of course, after Magic/Bird/MJ all retired the league continued to increase in popularity and value. Marketing and presentation of the product matters, and Stern understood that better than probably any other commissioner in American sports history.

If you want to knock him for the lockouts, the suit-and-tie rule, how he handled Donald Sterling, that is all fair game. But find me another league that is more player-friendly than the NBA. Part of that is the nature of the sport, but no league offers so much money to its players for often very little value. A league where a career bench player like Ian Mahimni has made $80 million and counting, true franchise stars can make $250 million in five seasons. A league where players move around freely, perhaps too much so, hopping from team to team each off-season. A league that encourages and supports players who speak out about issues that are important to them, while other leagues ostracize that talent. Stern and the NBA have made some mistakes for sure, but it also has to be recognized that the players have garnered excellent treatment for the league, in relation to most other sports leagues.

In addition, he was instrumental in growing the game internationally and also was a huge, huge part of the foundation of the WNBA; that league does not get off the ground without his consistent advocacy for women's basketball.

I'm not really a Stern fanboy, I think the Donaghy scandal was terrible, the Sonics leaving a tragedy, and some of the decisions made over the years have aged poorly, but you could argue that nobody had a bigger impact on basketball than David Stern, save for Dr. Naismith himself.
 
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reggiecleveland

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People dismissing Stern's success growing the game because he was fortunate enough to have Magic/Bird/Jordan need to go back and understand what the league was like back when he first took charge. In particular, look at the reign of Larry O'Brien. Let's just say that the words "innovator" or "progressive" were not mentioned in the first paragraph of his obituary. Yeah, it was great to have those stars, but the league had plenty of marketable stars before them (Cousy, Wilt, Baylor, West, Dr. J, etc.) and look where they were. Of course, after Magic/Bird/MJ all retired the league continued to increase in popularity and value. Marketing and presentation of the product matters, and Stern understood that better than probably any other commissioner in American sports history.
This is bingo. Can you imagine a more marketable star that Wilt. He was literal giant in deed, personality, celebrity, etc. But, the NBA in those days frowned on Wilt's celebrity, and Kareem standing out too much. Stern could have done the saem thing with Kareem, Walton, Iceman, Dr. J, as he did with Larry and Magic.


My specific examples of him getting thing done, and using his power include one popular and one unpopular today, that both accomplished what he wanted.

1. He cleaned up handchecking in one season. (effectively ending my hopes as a pro) . They cleaned this up and opened the game up for what we see today. I know some refs that said some veteran officials wer literaly in Stern's office being told to call hand checks or retire. Contrast this with the decades ti took the NHL to do anything about hooking and slashing.

2. The bench dress code. Sure this is seen as a white prejudice, "No fun League" thing, but it sure helped the image of the league. Soon the players became competitive about suits and fashion, rather than baggiest pants or craziest hat angle. It painted the players as what they were, and are millionaires at work. The very best in the world at what they do. In many ways this move defeated the racists, and created an image easier to sell.
 

Kliq

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This is bingo. Can you imagine a more marketable star that Wilt. He was literal giant in deed, personality, celebrity, etc. But, the NBA in those days frowned on Wilt's celebrity, and Kareem standing out too much. Stern could have done the saem thing with Kareem, Walton, Iceman, Dr. J, as he did with Larry and Magic.


My specific examples of him getting thing done, and using his power include one popular and one unpopular today, that both accomplished what he wanted.

1. He cleaned up handchecking in one season. (effectively ending my hopes as a pro) . They cleaned this up and opened the game up for what we see today. I know some refs that said some veteran officials wer literaly in Stern's office being told to call hand checks or retire. Contrast this with the decades ti took the NHL to do anything about hooking and slashing.

2. The bench dress code. Sure this is seen as a white prejudice, "No fun League" thing, but it sure helped the image of the league. Soon the players became competitive about suits and fashion, rather than baggiest pants or craziest hat angle. It painted the players as what they were, and are millionaires at work. The very best in the world at what they do. In many ways this move defeated the racists, and created an image easier to sell.
I think it is fair to say that it was harder to sell the game in the 1960s than the 80s, technology was better for live sports and there were more people who had grown up with the NBA as a real thing, so fandom and championships and legacy all meant more. However it wasn't like the league was a bunch of Vern Mikkelsens and Neil Johnstons before Stern became involved. The league had plenty of marketable stars who had fan friendly games and charisma pre-Bird/Magic/MJ, but they were never fully capitalized on.

Your number two is interesting; in hindsight it feels like a black mark on Stern's reputation and probably couldn't be passed today without an insane amount of controversy, but the long-lasting effect has been a very strong positive for the players. I think athletes in general across the board have become much more serious about their profession over the last 25 years, as the salaries have gotten bigger and I don't know how much of that can be attributed to Stern, but over that time the NBA and the NBAPA deserve a lot of credit for working hard on the leagues image.
 

bankshot1

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Speaking as a fan of the Celtics and the NBA since the late 50s, the problem the NBA had marketing its products in the 60s, was probably the product was increasingly black and the buyer was overwhelmingly white, with very little interaction or a comfort levels with their darker brothers. The real black mark is America was pretty racist in the 60s. So maybe the guy responsible for the eventual success of the NBA is the first LBJ (the one who married Lady Byrd), with his dogged determination to pass civil rights legislation in the 60s..
 

Big John

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Speaking as a fan of the Celtics and the NBA since the late 50s, the problem the NBA had marketing its products in the 60s, was probably the product was increasingly black and the buyer was overwhelmingly white, with very little interaction or a comfort levels with their darker brothers. The real black mark is America was pretty racist in the 60s. So maybe the guy responsible for the eventual success of the NBA is the first LBJ (the one who married Lady Byrd), with his dogged determination to pass civil rights legislation in the 60s..
Exactly. If Ben Kerner had kept Russell instead of trading him for two white players..... See: https://www.stlmag.com/Hoop-Dream-An-Alternate-History/

Stern also didn't have to deal with competition from the ABA, with that red white and blue ball, a three point shot, the first all-star slam dunk contest (in 1976, at the ABA's last all-star game) dynamic players, e.g. Julius Erving, David Thompson, Billy Cunningham, Louie Dampier, and George Gervin, and innovative coaches like Doug Moe. And with guys like John Brisker and Wendell Ladner in the league, any night could be malice at the palace. It was more entertaining than the antiseptic NBA.