It’s official, NBA commissioner (czar, dictator, whatever you feel most comfortable with) is drunk with power to the point his ego is running the NBA. And to clarify, I literally mean David Stern’s ego in running the NBA now, now David Stern himself.
How did we reach a point where an American professional sports league is ran by a man who believes he is so powerful he can control everything? Can anyone stop him? He reminds us of any run of the mill movie villain, who has the crazy eyes and drives the car 180 miles towards the cliff, demanding, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it! And I’ll do it because I can.”
Stern was willing to set his own league afire this past summer and fall. In fact, he poured the gas and held the matches. He even lit a couple and waved them near the rubble that had become the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations.
He did this despite knowing how that worked out for the NHL several years ago. He did this despite the fact that the country is still in a recession and was just pissed off enough from the NFL lockout (one that did not miss any games but was still irritating) that everyone thought it was stupid. He did this in spite of a growing and shared belief that the NBA has been overpaying players for years.
The rationale for the lockout was not much better. “Hey, we know our teams can’t manage money very well and often give out 6-year, $60 million to the likes of Eddy Curry, but help us out of this jam.”
That’s like buying a mansion, not making the payments for a couple years and then right before foreclosure, asking your 70-year-old parents for money.
Ironically, this isn’t even about the NBA lockout and how Stern has lost his foothold with league owners who are no longer scared of him. It’s about how Stern is perhaps scared of them.
How else does one explain the blatant collusion involved with blocking New Orleans’ trade of Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers last week? By all accounts, Hornets general manager Dell Demps had been given full authority to execute a trade. Teams had contacted the league to check if deals for Paul would be blocked. Everyone did their due diligence. And so they proceeded in putting together a trade that took many days and man hours to pull off.
It didn’t take long for Stern to squash it. Coincidentally, everybody’s favorite moronic owner, Cleveland Cavaliers whiner Dan Gilbert, wrote an e-mail to Stern demanding that he stop the trade. The e-mail was leaked to the media shortly after the NBA blocked the trade.
The league may own the Hornets because basketball can’t survive in New Orleans, but they did themselves a huge disservice. Demps nearly resigned, reportedly. He was undermined in this whole thing and now his authority has been undercut, his team micromanaged by Stern.
As has been pointed out before, there’s no way Chris Paul is resigning with the Hornets when his contract expires at the end of the season. They will get nothing for him if he stays. By all accounts, most around the league felt the Hornets had won the purposed trade with the Lakers and Rockets.
But not Stern apparently.
All this on the heels of his posturing during the lockout, demanding the players had chosen a “nuclear winter.” And on the heels of reports that Stern belittled stars like Dwayne Wade and Paul Pierce during the negotiation sessions.
And let us not forget Stern’s changing the rules as we go style of leadership, the dress code, the headband rule (where you can’t wear your headband any way but right side up, logo facing forward).
I enjoy the dress code and the professionalism, as do others. But that’s not the point. Stern’s ego is driving the bus now. He doesn’t oversee a league and try to ensure balance, he enforces what he believes is fair and right and just. Too much hip-hop flavor? Dress code! Too many guys showing creativity in wearing arm bands or headbands, let’s get a rule out on that. Memo-style, double-spaced.
The league berated the players during the lockout with a hard line agenda that meant to imply they would not become Major League Baseball, where a few teams spend tons of money and have dominating rosters while two-thirds of the league meanders through the season in mediocrity ever year.
There’s just one problem: the NBA has always been that way, whether they pretend to want parity or think they once had it. From the period of 1980-2005, only seven teams even won NBA championships. And that list grows to only nine when you expand from 1980-2011. Thirty-one years, just nine different franchises have won championships. That’s quite a bit less than Major League Baseball during the same period.
The small market owners are trying to fight the power and demand they should compete with the big markets. They actually believe superstars want to play in Milwaukee and Cleveland and Indianapolis. Forget the lack of state income taxes in places like Florida, factors like weather and big cities like New York and Chicago. Who wants to play in a state that has beaches and sunshine 300 days a year when you can play in a gray, dreary place?
You can’t control free agency, David. You can’t control players like LeBron James and Dwayne Wade taking less to play together. If Chris Paul really wants to play in L.A. or New York, he might take $10 million less to do it.
You can be mad that the Heat’s trio (James, Wade and Bosh) chose to all play together instead of fight against each other. You can be mad the Celtics pulled off trades and signings that netted them Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen (along with Rajon Rondo) four years ago. You can be mad that the Lakers are always a draw to superstars who love the media, Hollywood, sunshine and being a star in a town of stars.
You can be mad. You can hope to change it.
But you can stop none of it.
That is, unless your name is David Stern and you believe yourself to be the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. Are we gonna have to zap him like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man one of these days?
His ego has overtaken his once strong and level-headed mind. Stern is no longer the same man that brought the NBA out of tape-delay and made it global. He’s an egomaniac who thinks everyone is a puppet whose strings he can pull.
It’s time to step away, David.
And if you won’t, then somebody needs to cut the strings.
With you.
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