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| Seattle Public Enemy #1 |
That was David Stern’s opening statement in 2013 after the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting in Dallas. The main topic of conversation at that meeting was the fate of the wobegone Sacramento Kings: were they to be sold to a group led by Chris Hansen and Steve Ballmer, with the intent of relocating the franchise to Seattle, or was the sale to be rejected in favour of an 11th hour offer from a Bay Area group headed by Warriors minor partner Vivek Ranadive that would keep the team in Sacramento. By a vote of 22-8, the relocation to Seattle sale was rejected at that meeting, and David Stern, when facing a sizable collection of Seattle-area media for likely the last time, just couldn’t resist the opportunity to get in one last shot. (Here is the entire press conference, in full.) And it wasn't just a slip of the tongue, either. Nothing David Stern ever said or did was uncalculated.
That David Stern would happen to step down as commissioner of the NBA on the same weekend that the Seattle Seahawks are playing in the Super Bowl is an act of serendipity likely to leave a Seattle sports fan wondering if, for once, the stars are aligning over the Emerald City. (Further adding to this feeling is the retirement of Chuck Armstrong, who has presided over the disintegration of the Seattle Mariners, but we’ve dealt with those clownshoes before.) For after barely lifting a finger to prevent the Sonics from being moved to Oklahoma City, Stern basically held the hands of Sacramento civic leaders and bought time until they could all their ducks in a row. The entire process was rife with unstated animosity, all stemming from the fact that the speaker of the Washington State Legislature, Frank Chopp, had made a point of telling Stern during a hearing that the NBA’s business model – extorting sweetheart arena deals from municipalities and, essentially, taking billions of dollars in public subsidies – was garbage.
Which, quite honestly, it is.
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And now that I’m given him props, I’m going to trash his ass. And I'm probably going to froth at the mouth an be irrational. I apologize in advance.
David Stern was also a lucky bastard. He was lucky that the L.A. Lakers won the coin flip and got to draft Magic Johnson. He was lucky that Red Auerbach knew the draft rules inside and out when he selected Larry Bird. He was lucky that the Portland Trail Blazers were stupid enough to draft Sam Bowie, permitting Michael Jordan to land in an enormous market – Chicago – that had been so badly mismanaged over the years by the NBA that the original expansion franchise in Chicago left what was then the 2nd largest city in America for the greener pastures of … Baltimore. He was ‘lucky’ when his first installment of the NBA lottery landed the next fabled talent to come along, Patrick Ewing, in New York City. The placement of the greatest talents in some of the most storied franchises of the game (or, in the case of Chicago, the untapped market ready to rise), the media and marketing machine could go about selling the stars of the game – but it only worked because those players were great, and those franchises turned out to be great. (Well, not the Knicks, but you don’t have to be great in New York to get attention, you just have to make enough noise to catch the ear of all the media outlets down the street.)
But the unintended consequence of this was the creation of several caste systems within the league. The superstars get all the calls, the glamour franchises get all the breaks. It wasn’t really news when a referee was found to be betting on games, because a lot of people had just sort of assumed that games were fixed to begin with. (People in Seattle have never forgotten this game, and no one in Sacramento will ever forget this one.) There’s always been a fraudulent, disingenuous overtone to the way the NBA conducts its business during the David Stern era, one espoused in the spin well-becoming of the battle-tested attorney who headed the operation.
The latter part of Stern’s tenure was marked by franchise relocations, conflicts of interest (aka The Curious Case of Chris Paul), labor unrest and lockouts. The NBA at present seems to have about 8 franchises that are actually trying to win and 22 more that are trying to be as bad as possible so as to get into the lottery. (Don’t tell the players that, of course, a lot of whom are busting their asses in spite of their front offices … *cough cough* Phoenix Suns *cough cough*) The entire operation is about contracts and cap space and exemptions. The game itself rarely seems to matter. And fans have tired of this: in an era where some of the greatest talents the game has ever seen are taking to the court, the NBA is selling fewer tickets these days than their winter counterparts, the NHL. Does anyone actually take the NBA seriously right now?
And then there is that whole Oklahoma City thing. Watch this documentary to understand it. I was a season ticket holder in Seattle. This game was one of the most wonderful, most exciting things I have ever been a part of. So if I sound like I have an axe to grind, well, I do. So there.
I am fortunate to have one of the few teams in the NBA that does seem to want to win in my backyard at the moment. They have Stephen Curry, probably the greatest shooter in the history of humanity. They have a terrific first six guys that can do everything – inside scoring, deep threes, shotblocking, midrange, transition game, and the five starters are all good passers, to boot. The Golden State Warriors are doing what seemed unthinkable a few years ago, which is making me like the NBA again.
Sort of.
I love the game of basketball and always have. Basketball is the athletic equivalent of jazz, a unique expression of the American urban experience that’s free-flowing and rife with improvisations, and yet it’s also right at home in the farmlands and the countryside. (What? No jazz roots in rural America? Listen to some old Western Swing records and tell me otherwise.) It’s also a game free of fences and walls, the spectators sitting right up close, the only demarcation being an unstated but understood line that neither side should cross, and does so at its own peril. That sense of danger is palpable when you play an away game. You never quite feel comfortable. It’s pretty exciting, actually.
Yet it’s also a game that’s easily manipulated. The rules grant far too much power to a referee to affect the result. (Referees don’t actually want to do that, of course.) It’s always been a game where hucksters and hustlers slink about in the shadows. (In the modern AAU era, the hucksters don’t even hide anymore.) David Stern is a different sort of huckster, one that’s well-dressed and well-spoken, big into packaging and public image, a Cheshire cat with little to nothing behind the grin. His efforts have turned the NBA into ‘fan-tastic,’ family-friendly, glitzy entertainment, but the game just doesn’t seem to matter much anymore.
Maybe that would change if a wrong could somehow be righted and the Sonics returned to their rightful place, but as much as I think that the Kings franchise would’ve been better off in Seattle, the idea of swooping up some other city’s franchise still feels a bit unclean. I wish Sacramento well and hope it all works out (although I doubt it will, but that is for another time.) And I don’t live in Seattle, anyway, so maybe my connections to the Sonics are just some act of the sort of nostalgia dabbling I generally decry.
But when David Stern decided to do his Little Napoleon routine, throwing his weight behind some carpetbagging sleazebags from Oklahoma and deciding it was worth picking a fight with the entirety of my home state so as to secure the franchise for that group of robber barons, he ceased once and for all to be a good commissioner. He was well on his way to irrelevance with the messes he made in Charlotte and Vancouver, but the Sonics fiasco sealed the deal. It was no longer about good business, at that point. It was all personal. And when you fancy yourself an Emperor, you don’t like being told that you’re wearing no clothes.
Good riddance.
