Of all the encomiums of David Stern in the days since his death on New Year's Day, all of them written by people who fought with themselves to figure out how to commingle the creative figure, the inventive monetizer and the rampant bully over strong and weak alike, the one that seems to have been forgotten is this:
David Stern broke the job of commissioner, utterly and completely, in every sport.
Stern suffered fools exceedingly poorly, and barely tolerated bright people. He not only believed his word was a command but that it was divinely inspired and was always the only logical option. He did not create Bird-Magic, or Jordan, or Bryant or James, nor did he build the Lakers', Celtics', Bulls', Spurs' or Warriors' dynasties, but he did figure out (again, with help from an array of smart people that he found and nurture-prodded) ways to make all things matter far more to the American sports fan than what could have been conceived when he began his job nearly 40 years ago.
And toward that end, where's the credit for the NBA smarties who found Stern and gave him the keys to the car, the car itself and eventually the entire garage? That's how credit works, though — there's plenty to go around if you're willing to look hard enough.
But we digress. Stern had a significant, even if occasionally ham-handed, role in the growth of the NBA into a multi-billion-dollar industry, and raising the value for every team all the way down to the Memphises and New Orleans' of the world. Almost every team is owned by a billionaire even after you take out the value of the team itself, and every team is now worth more than a billion dollars as a stand-alone.
And the funny thing about billionaires is that they tend not defer to employees, especially when times are flush. David Stern helped make the NBA too big for people like David Stern.
The same is true in the NFL, a league once dominated by commissioner Pete Rozelle and now dominating commissioner Roger Goodell, and there are significant limitations to the imperial natures of Rob Manfred (MLB) and Gary Bettman (NHL), but Stern was the last one to actually run a league for owners rather than the other way around. It is now a job for gentle cajoling and nuanced suggestions, and those have not been listed in any of the eulogies as a Stern strength.
Warriors president and COO in charge of new arena, rainmaking Rick Welts, who worked under Stern for 17 years, suggested as much Thursday when he said that Stern admitted in a conversation that he would not have handled the NBA's tiff with China the way successor Adam Silver did, and probably would have handled it worse because of his lead-with-your-fist problem-solving nature. Silver had to navigate between a sovereign nation with a hypersensitive nature and occasionally dodgy human rights record, two NBA owners (Houston and Brooklyn) and the American understanding of fair comment, and Stern credited him with not making the problem (which still exists, though on the back burner) dramatically worse.
Stern issued commands, and jousted often with the uppities like Dallas' Mark Cuban; Silver gently nudges. Then again, Stern was taking a modest sports league and driving it toward mega-profitability, and Silver is charged with conciliation, maintenance and upkeep. The jobs are different, staggeringly so, and require different skill sets. While Silver might have been as effective as Stern 40 years ago, it seems clear that Stern would be less effective now because his style was to lead through creative contempt (or creative contemptuousness). That's not a style a commissioner gets to have when the bosses can buy and sell him multiple times just out of the canteen coffee money.
So there you have it — Stern helped build a league so large that he couldn't lead it, built a neighborhood so posh he couldn't live in it. Both are tributes to a man for his times.
He would have been a swell modern owner, though. All he would have had to do was multiply his wealth by a factor of 30. He probably could have coaxed that out of Steve Ballmer over lunch.