The evolution of the NBA during your term was what makes the NBA what it is now

Head Ninja In Charge said:

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Whatever you think about him, he's still (by far) the most successful commissioner in the history of American sports.

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what does that even mean?

Pete Rozelle's ghost says to tap those brakes

DannyDuberstein said:

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Pete Rozelle's ghost says to tap those brakes

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Agree.

The way all of sports have grown, all these commissioners probably have some pretty high revenue growth under their guidance.

Yeah, Rozelle presided over the afl-nfl merger, incredible use of television to market his league (including concepts like Monday Night Football), how to negotiate tv contracts, a league where the owners still have the most favorable financial leverage over the players. and the greatest single sporting event of all time, the Super Bowl. Every greatest commissioner discussion should be Rozelle then gap then a debate about #2.

Tsk tsk Danny the all knowing guitasoup and his minions have spoken

Sports Guy agrees with Stern > Rozelle. But the two have no peer in sports. Stern even had to weather suspending the most popular and important athlete in any sport for gambling and pulled it off without a hitch.

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Book_of_Basketball.html?id=oLCSBeuStRcC

Not attempting to rank him, but he took over a league where Finals games were often shown on tape delay and helped turn it into the world's second most popular sport.

Of course it's impossible to know whether or not this would have happened with any commissioner that was running the show when Michael Jordan exploded onto the scene.

Stern was great, no doubt. I do think he benefited from running the playbook Rozelle wrote, but to his credit, he ran it well.

DannyDuberstein said:

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Stern was great, no doubt. I do think he benefited from running the playbook Rozelle wrote, but to his credit, he ran it well.

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No question he learned and benefited from Rozelle.

Rob Parker not a big fan of stern as commissioner and says as much in the dan Patrick show

MookieBlaylock said:

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Rob Parker not a big fan of stern as commissioner and says as much in the dan Patrick show

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Rob Parker questioned RG3's "blackness" because he had a white girlfriend and voted Republican. You probably don't want to use him to back up your arguments...

Arguably, there's no Dirk without him. No Hakeem. No Manu or Parker. No Yao. No Jokic. No Gasols. No Peja or Vlade. What he did to make the NBA an international game was transformational.

And he was smart enough not to blackball Jordan and let him take a baseball sabbatical.

It's not an understatement to say that Stern is the single most important person in NBA history (since Naismith). I'm not sure basketball in America would be anything more than a tertiary, MLS level hobby, without his guidance.

He had his warts, but he laid the foundation for what the NBA could be. RIP commish.

More like NHL, Stern did some heavy lifting as far as cleaning up the image of the league, but Jordan, and then Shaq, and then Lebron after him had a lot to do with the popularity of the game.

And yeah, I left out Kobe, but Kobe wasn't the transcending player that Shaq was and is. Doesn't have the personality for it.

Kobe was much more popular than Shaq.

With that said, while he did get lucky with Bird/Magic and then Jordan as vehicles for popularizing the sport, he was the one who pushed for making the NBA a star-driven league. Convincing owners that letting their stars play in the 1992 Olympics was probably one of the three most important moments in NBA history. Maybe most important.

Yes, and he helped make Bird & Magic big.

The NBA had stars before Stern took over, but Larry O'Brien didn't capitalize.
There was arguably the greatest player of all time who was from UCLA and in the movies in Kareem.
Dr J was evolutionary.
Moses, Walton, David Thompson, Pistol Pete, Big E, George Genie and the first years of Bird & Magic.

And the Knicks won a world title.

Head Ninja In Charge said:

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Whatever you think about him, he's still (by far) the most successful commissioner in the history of American sports.

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NOT EVEN CLOSE. Pete Rozelle, for one, blows him away. And that isn't even arguable. As far as the NBA itself goes, even that one is arguable. O'Brien saw the NBA through its successful merger with the ABA. Even though he wasn't there 3 decades like Stern, he helped bring it back from almost the point of death to revival. Where the NBA was in 1975 (all but dead) to where it was in '85 is greater than from then to now. And O'Brien didn't have the explosion of cable or the internet. Not saying you CAN'T make a case for Stern over O'Brien, but you can't make one BY FAR. Stern, for one, has helped make the NBA less of a rough league, but the Malice in the Palace incident did happen 20 years after he took over. Plus, the other stuff mentioned.

As far as the Olympics and international stuff, I'm not going to discount Stern's role in all that. But that came in a different era than the '70s and early '80s than O'Brien governed in. The Olympics in general were moving toward pro athletes, at least in some competitions, in the mid-80s. That wasn't a David Stern invention.

If you don't know where the NBA and NFL (nowhere near where they are now) were 40, 50, and 60 years ago, you can't comment on successful commissioners. Stern may have had a big hand in moving the NBA forward, but he wasn't the most successful commissioner in sports.