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It seems so silly now.
In 1983, NBA players wore diaper-tight shorts, barely covering the buttocks. The sport was just getting over its 1970s hangover, which was stained by cocaine use and tape-delayed playoff games. The 1970s were the NBA's Middle Ages, a dark tunnel between the glories of the 1960s and the Bird-Magic rivalry in the 1980s.
But while Magic Johnson and Larry Bird first toiled the soil of the modern NBA, two more forces landed on the league in 1984.
Michael Jordan was drafted, and David Stern was named NBA commissioner. What took place since is equal parts corporate evolution and cultural revolution, with exponential growth led by Stern, who died on Wednesday, at age 77. His bio will read like a tome of NBA prosperity.
It seems so silly now.
In 1983, The NBA had just 23 teams, many of which played plodding, low-post basketball in sports outposts before a freckling of fans. If you didn't play for the Lakers, Celtics, or 76ers, you didn't really matter. It was good business to have footholds in major markets, but the NBA had to expand in reach and recruiting to plant its flag.
Under David Stern, the NBA morphed into a global titan from its regional days and coastal fiefdoms. And just as more modern players modeled their game after Jordan, they got their paychecks from the work by the commissioner.
The NBA's income in 1983 was $185 million. When Stern left his post in 2013, the league's revenue was $5.3 billion. Instead of 23 teams, there are now 30 teams. Instead of grainy replays of the NBA Finals, the entire playoffs are splashed live across several major networks. Instead of a few, flagship franchises around Harvard and Hollywood, we've seen hardwood behemoths from Miami, San Antonio and Oakland. In 1983, the Indiana Pacers were sold for $10.5 million. Today, the Pacers are worth $1.125 billion (according to Forbes) while the Knicks are worth over $4 billion.
Stern was also emblematic of the forward-thinking and diverse league the NBA has become. In 1983, there were no highlights of players from Latvia or Croatia or Argentina. Now, the league looks like an assembly of the United Nations. And it's fitting that a Jewish kid from Manhattan lorded over a league that went from mostly-white to mostly-black to its current rainbow of players from Boston to China to Chino Hills.
Before diversity became a pompous corporate mantra, Stern was about building a global brand while also empowering minorities in the U.S. He founded the WNBA, a sister league with no equivalent in other major team sports. Don't be surprised when the NBA hires the first female head coach, who can thank David Stern for culturally leapfrogging other leagues.
If Magic and Bird built the league’s foundation, then Stern applied the paint and stuffed it with furniture and turned the league from a low-rent flat into a must-see mansion on the order of Jay Gatsby. So, by the time Jordan owned the sport, the NBA house was big enough for Shaq and Kobe, for Duncan and Robinson, and Malone and Stockton.
It seems so silly now.
But it was a subtle opening act for the rock-star league the NBA has become today. Just as the star players knew where to pivot on the court, Stern knew the league would pivot on its stars. So perhaps his signature moment as commissioner came in 1992 when he sanctioned the “Dream Team,” the greatest collection of basketball players in human history, to play in Barcelona. While the Olympics were an amateur event - for Americans, at least - Stern unleashed a roll call of Hall of Famers on Spain, with their gold-medal stampede rippling across the world. The Dream Team gave the NBA a global platform and doubled as a billboard for athletes in distant pockets who didn't dream of a basketball career.
It bashed open borders, and flooded the NBA with Toni Kukoc and Dirk Nowitzki and Yao Ming and Dikembe Mutombo. And the migration still grows. The current NBA MVP (Giannis Antetokounmpo) is from Greece, and the favorite for this year's MVP (Luka Doncic) is from Slovenia.
Just listen to the tributes from the conga line of luminaries, from Jordan to Johnson to Bill Russell, and today's princes, from LeBron James to Steph Curry, all of whom marveled at Stern's prescience and tolerance, for his ability to be a hard-nosed negotiator who still kept his heart soft enough to fill the NBA's melting pot.
It seems so silly now.
Stern with his choppy mustache and 5’9” frame set against the forest of 7-footers. He was a Big Apple lawyer charged with saving a street-smart game. Perhaps only David Stern knew he was a visionary who could somehow diffuse the raging fire from the “Malice at the Palace” and still revive the NBA from it's post-Jordan slumber. Back in 2007, the Cavaliers and Spurs played a choppy championship round, the least-watched NBA Finals in recent history. The average TV audience in the ‘07 Finals was 9.2 million, yet Game 7 of the 2015 Finals had just under 20 million viewers.
In retrospect, there was nothing silly about the NBA, or David Stern, who planted the seeds of a sport that flowers around the world.