Last week, as the Indiana Pacers celebrated their series-clinching win over the New York Knicks, NBA fans took to social media to offer smirking assessments of an Indiana–Oklahoma City NBA Finals. Among them: David Stern would hate this. Stern, the New York–born ex-NBA commissioner, who once (allegedly) steered Patrick Ewing to the Knicks, who once (actually) declared his preferred Finals matchup to be “Lakers vs. Lakers,” would have cringed at a matchup between two of the league’s smallest markets, or so the commentary went. “Total bulls---,” says a longtime team exec. “David would have loved this.”
Indeed, as the NBA prepares to crown a new champion for the seventh consecutive season, it’s worth noting it was Stern who got this ball rolling. In 2011, Stern, determined to whittle down players’ share of basketball-related income and put in place a more constraining salary cap, locked the players out, forcing a 161-day work stoppage. The NBA, Stern said, needed a structure that “30 teams, if well managed, have an opportunity both to compete and to make a profit.” The league lost 16 games off the ’11–12 season. It gained a collective bargaining agreement that put it on a path to parity.
