My Power Struggle with David Stern

Let's hop in the DeLorean and travel back to 1994. Eight year old Jacob Weindling is doing his best LeBron James impersonation at his local JCC (Jewish Community Center, it's like the YMCA but with less homosexual undertones and more latkes). I had learned to dribble with both hands at a young age and was also one of roughly six kids in an eight team league who actually understood how to play basketball so I had a decided advantage against my Jewish counterparts. My domination on the basketball court combined with a darker complexion than my classmates lead a narrow minded eight year old Jacob to ask his dad if he was black. It felt like a completely honest question at the time but in retrospect it's the most racist thing I've ever said.


This is how my love affair with basketball started. I played competitively until my sophomore year in high school when my lack of a jump shot combined with my athletic ability made me realize it was probably a better idea to concentrate on baseball. I retired to the lunch time pickup game then accepted an offer from the UMass intramural league before retiring again to the weekend pickup game.

I am just as big of a fan of professional basketball as my hometown team, the Denver Nuggets. I have become a much bigger fan of the NBA over the past decade as the talent explosion made basketball fun to watch again after the mememe post-Jordan era. I thought David Stern had destroyed my interest in the NBA with the lockout and the Chris Paul debacle until I watched the NBA open its season on Christmas Day.


The lockout pissed me off me as it served as a microcosm for one of the biggest problems facing our society. It was just another group of billionaires whining about a system that makes them a lot of money but not as much as they want it to and if you only understood what they understood you would know why they had to kick and scream and bitch and moan and hold the season hostage in the name of a four to seven percent increase in revenue (or whatever the fuck they ended up fighting over). The NBA owners (especially the small market ones) attempted to humiliate and demean the players into a state where they would believe that playing in Milwaukee was tantamount to playing in Chicago. It's the only explanation for why they treated the players with so little respect during the lockout (and yes, I do believe that guys like Dan Gilbert are so stupid that they thought it would work).

The players were disgusting too; they wanted to keep the status quo simply because it was the status quo. When people pointed out how absurd it is for Joe Johnson to make $119 million (because no one is buying a ticket just to see Joe Johnson), the players simply said "well it's not our fault the owners keep offering us dumb contracts." The lack of accountability during the lockout was appalling and it was only exacerbated by the fraud that was the Chris Paul trade.

If I didn't hate the Lakers so much I would probably feel sorry for them. David Stern and his small market puppet masters fought the entire lockout to regain control over their labor. Small market owners were concerned that many players would follow in Carmelo's, LeBron's, and Chris Bosh's steps by bolting small markets for bigger ones. Then on the day the lockout ends, a trade between a league-owned small market team (no conflict of interest there, no sir) and a big market team was completed.

Dan Gilbert dashed to his Comic Sans MS-mobile and fired off another angry e-mail to David Stern bitching about Chris Paul jumping ship to the Lakers. So the trade was rescinded because of "basketball reasons" and a couple days later the New Orleans Hornets found a better trade (although the initial deal with the Lakers was very good). That trade was with...Los Angeles. Wasn't the whole point of rescinding the first deal to avoid another situation where a small market star jumped ship to a big market? Do the rest of the NBA owners know that the Clippers play in LA?

Of all the dark moments in recent NBA history, this was the darkest. This, more than the Donaghy scandal, threw the competitive legitimacy of the league into question. It was at this moment that I felt I was done with the NBA. David Stern had failed his most important task: to ensure that people think the league is decided on the court. Sunday, I eschewed my people's traditional Christmas Day tradition of Chinese Food food (Jesus, can you tell I was raised Jewish? Who else inherently capitalizes food?) and movies and threw the NBA on my TV (I kept the Chinese food, I can only accept so much change at a time).

Don't listen to anyone who still denounces the NBA as a league where "everyone just goes one on one" and "there's no teamwork." They're just old cranks who can't look past the tattoos and refuse to actually watch the product. They are actually right on some level; the problem is that the teams that exhibit the qualities they hate so much are always the teams picking in the lottery. The Mavericks won the title last year because they were able to surround one superduperstar with a ton of guys with a high basketball IQ who were willing to play specific roles tailored to exploit their opponents weaknesses. The Lakers won the year before because of team defense and rebounding in spite of Kobe's 4/24 in Game 7.

If all you needed to win in the NBA is a bunch of great one on one players then the Heat should have gone 82-0 last year. Instead, they struggled because Bosh, Wade, & LeBron were all adjusting from teams built entirely around them (once they all figure out how to play together, watch out). The NBA is absolutely fantastic right now. Three of the last four finals have been riveting, and the cadre of young stars in the game is as good as any era in history.

On Christmas day I realized that the reason I cannot avoid watching the NBA is because I love basketball, and the NBA just so happens to be where the sport is played at its highest level. Because my loyalty is tied to the sport and not a league or a team, no one commissioner or player can spoil my appetite for good basketball. When Derrick Rose hit that dagger of a teardrop in the lane against the Lakers, how many people were thinking about David Stern or Dan Gilbert at that point? Zero. We were captivated by basketball poetry. The final seconds of the Knicks and Bulls wins were the exorcism of one of the worst offseasons in NBA history and they were exactly what the NBA and its fans needed.

We watch because we want to see the reigning MVP trade blows with the best basketball player of the last fifteen years. Melo and Amare's quest to resurrect the Knicks is as much a cultural drama (because Melo and Amare chose the Knicks simply because they are the New York Knicks and playing for them is different than playing for Phoenix, Denver, or even Los Angeles) as it is a basketball drama. Basketball is a beautiful sport and we have been blessed with an incredible amount of talent in today's NBA (it helps that the talent plays in compelling markets like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles). David Stern did all he could do to tarnish the competitive integrity of the league short of donning a jersey and defending LeBron but the league is still standing. As much as I wanted to quit on the league, I realized that I cannot quit on the sport. Count me in for the 2012 season.

*Short diatribe on my Denver Nuggets before we go: There are ten solid to very good players on the roster and that is before you get to guys like Jordan Hamilton (he could be J.R. Smith with his head screwed on straight, I loved him at Texas), Corey Brewer (defensive ace, under-appreciated in Minnesota), and Timofey Mozgov. They are deep and they are going to run like crazy with Ty Lawson at the point and now that Melo is gone, George Karl can actually get his team to play defense. They are going to be a nightmare to play in Denver, especially during those hellacious stretches of five games in seven days. If there ever was a year to produce an unconventional title team, this is the year because of the shortened and compressed schedule. The rule in the NBA is superstars win championships but the Pistons proved that to be false in 2004. If there is a team in the NBA that resembles that Detroit title team with Chauncey, Rip, & Sheed, it's the Nuggets. No one is deeper than they are. They can win the West if Ty Lawson and Arron Afflalo make the leap from good to All-Star caliber players. They also have their one crazy person to keep things interesting (Al Harrington is the Nuggets' Sheed). I'm not saying they will win the West but I do not see that big of a difference between them and teams like the Mavericks, Thunder, and Lakers.