David Stern left a great, but complicated, legacy that is part of the fabric of the NBA
By Phil Watson
David Stern ruled the NBA with a strong hand — some might even say it was more of an iron fist — during his 30 years as its commissioner. His passing leaves a legacy that is as complex as it is great.
The man many consider to be the architect of the modern NBA died Wednesday. Longtime NBA commissioner David Stern’s passing came just a month from the sixth anniversary of his retirement as the association’s longest-serving commissioner.
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When Stern left the NBA offices on Feb. 1, 2014, he had overseen a period of unprecedented growth for the league, a period during which the television contract to grew 40 times what it had been in 1983-84 and the average player salary skyrocketed from $250,000 to nearly $5 million, according to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst.
Stern changed the NBA, of this there can be no question. As positively unfathomable as it is to think of now, the NBA Playoffs were still sometimes being aired on tape-delay by CBS for the first three years Stern was on the job.
But a new television deal with NBC in 1989 brought unprecedented money — some $600 million, according to the New York Times — and ushered in a new era that would no longer see the NBA operating in the shadows of more established professional leagues in football and baseball.
At the start of the 2019-20 season, there were 108 international players on NBA rosters from 38 nations and territories, just off the records of 116 players (2016-17) and 42 countries (2017-18).
Stern was a major driving force behind greasing the wheels to bring NBA players to the Olympic Games in 1992, considered to be the jumping off point for the league’s explosion in global popularity.
As an attorney working for the league in 1976, Stern got his first real public exposure while working on the landmark Oscar Robertson antitrust case that opened the doors to free agency and closed them on the rival American Basketball Association, which got four of its teams into the NBA.
As the NBA’s executive vice president, Stern negotiated the first revenue sharing agreement with the National Basketball Players Association and ushered in the salary cap era which — for better and worse — has been the order of the day since the 1984-85 season.
The league grew from 23 teams at the time Stern became commissioner to 27 after a two-year, four-team expansion to Charlotte, Miami, Minneapolis and Orlando in 1988 and 1989; to 29 with the Canadian invasion of Toronto and Vancouver in 1995; and finally to 30 with the re-admission of Charlotte in 2004.
Any one of these accomplishments would stand on its own as a crowning achievement, but Stern oversaw all of these.
His inductions, first into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014 and later the FIBA Hall of Fame in 2016, were more than justified based on what he accomplished for the NBA and for growing the game internationally.
More than a mere indelible mark, David Stern forged a huge part of the very foundation of the National Basketball Association.
But his legacy is as complicated as it is great, as Stern’s personality and some of his decisions also left long-lasting marks — not all of them attractive — on the association, as well.