THEE OFFICIAL 2019-2020 NBA OFFSEASON THREAD: VICTORY LAP

kingjay718 · Jan 1, 2020

Thank you Mr. Stern! A big reason why our childhoods were great. Wish you and **** Ebersol would’ve Kept the nba on nbc, nonetheless that was a great moving taking the nba from boring cbs.

much appreciated. I still wish he was commissioner. that man was cold blooded off camera though.

MVP · Jan 1, 2020

Stern made the league a global game and that's ultimately his lasting legacy. Didn't rock with some of the cultural decisions he implemented and 'basketball reasons' still doesn't sit right but his impact on what the game is today is undeniable, RIP.

kingjay718 · Jan 1, 2020

pmatic · Jan 1, 2020

RIP Stern.

nflowshoe · Jan 1, 2020

esydc said:

pmatic · Jan 1, 2020

My favorite David Stern was the NBA Draft David Stern.

BIG LEEMELONE · Jan 1, 2020

Stern fined Heat owner Micky Arison $500,000 for tweeting about a lockout, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban about $2 million in all for criticizing the refs. He fined Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor $3.5 million, took three of his first-round picks, and suspended him for a year for basketball's answer to Michael Pineda's pine-tar crime: He got caught playing the kind of funny salary-cap games a lot of executives were playing.

Stern fined then-Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy $100,000 for saying a league official had warned him that Yao Ming would be targeted by refs for illegal screens, and added that Van Gundy was "not going to continue in this league" if he kept talking. Stern fined Spurs coach Gregg Popovich $250,000 for daring to rest his stars in a regular-season game against the Miami Heat. In a different life, Stern even fined Sterling $25 million for moving his franchise from San Diego to Los Angeles without permission before reducing the penalty to $6 million -- this as a counter to Sterling's choice to sue the league for $100 million.

But Stern didn't bother to hit the Clippers' owner, or at the very least investigate him, when he gleefully admitted to trading money for sex. Or when he paid a $2.7 million settlement to the U.S. Justice Department after he was accused in a federal discrimination suit of saying that "black tenants smell and attract vermin" and that "Hispanics smoke, drink, and just hang around the building." Or when Elgin Baylor accused Sterling in a wrongful termination suit of establishing "a vision of a Southern plantation-type structure" for the franchise and of wanting a team of "poor black boys from the South" that, of course, would play for a white coach.

RIP