NBA 2013-14 Season - Page 175

On February 02 2014 08:28 lamprey1 wrote:
Imagine if the Raptors had drafted Aldridge instead of Barn.
Imagine adding Aldridge to this current squad.

Basically, Colangelo's decision to take Barn instead of Aldridge cost him his job.

On February 02 2014 10:07 AgentW wrote:
A quick point about Bynum: is he even good right now? He's moving terribly and perhaps they're just signing him on potential to perhaps trade Mahinimi to open up cap room? I'm not convinced Bynum's going to help them much in his current state. I'd assume their either playing keep away from Miami or hoping he recaptures his old ability. With him playing about 15 minutes a night, I can see him being moderately effective, but I don't see a scenario where he and Hibbert realistically share the floor.


I'm not surprised at all. Have fun with being in Cleveland for two more years, Kyrie!

On February 02 2014 08:48 Ace wrote:


I think the big extensions to Bargs were the real killers. After seeing him play his first few years why wouldn't you let him walk? Colangelo also had a host of other bad moves that finally got management to get rid of him.

Dumars has to be next to go though. He is really, really awful.

So, handed a remarkable turn of fortune that he helped engineer, what did David Stern do? Well, he grew the brand, as the marketing people say, and he grew it astonishingly well. The value of the franchises has increased tenfold. There are four television networks broadcasting NBA games worldwide. He has managed to stay ahead of the curve technologically, moving the league into the digital age more smoothly than was the case with many other American industries. The players make gobs of money. David Stern’s work here is done.

However, it has come at a price. By marrying the NBA to its “corporate partners,” and by doing it so thoroughly and so well, Stern has cost the league much of its soul, in the fullest meaning of the word. Both the 1998 and the 2011 lockouts were stupid and unnecessary and seemed more than a little like they were more about control and the authority of Stern’s office than they were about money or anything else. (In 2011, Stern gave preposterous interviews in which, channeling his inner Bud Selig, he maintained that 22 NBA teams were losing money, which, I guarantee you, was not something he was telling his corporate partners, or his good friends over in China. This wasn’t Larry O’Brien and Larry Fleisher operating in rare good faith.) He presided over — and indeed, celebrated — the unconscionable hijacking of a franchise from one of the NBA’s most loyal fan bases in Seattle because the city wouldn’t give in to ensemble blackmail and build the team a new arena. The specter of the days when the NBA was thought to be “too black” never has been far from his decision to knuckle Allen Iverson about rap music and to create and enforce a silly dress code that was applauded by great swaths of the nation’s boring people, and to make a buck off the softer side of hip-hop culture while remaining terrified of its tougher precincts.

There is an essential cowardice in all authoritarians, which becomes more obvious as they tighten their grip. In the long view, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the more the NBA prospered, and the more tightly it bound itself to the corporate money that swarmed on that success like bugs on honey, the more nervous it got about how wealthy it had become. The more luxurious the palace, the deeper the moat. And David Stern’s primary job over the past two decades has been to dig the moat. He has been the vehicle of the deep insecurity that has come with the NBA’s headlong success.

He has made the league gleam, but he has sanded off its edges, and let that be his legacy. He made a product that people will buy. He has sold the NBA in Qatar, and the guy behind the counter was happy, and so there’s that, and nobody throws pizzas at David Stern anymore, just roses by the handful