This was bound to happen, and now it has: An ugly brawl courtside between NBA players and fans. There is one man who is ultimately responsible for this. He has had praised heaped on him for years for being a marketing genius. He has lauded for solving the differences between the have teams and the have not teams. Now he is due his just criticism for the disintegration of the NBA. That man is, of course, David Stern.
I used to be an NBA junky as a kid. I knew everybody in the NBA and their stats. I'd go out on the playground and pretend I was Sidney Moncrief or Terry Cummings (I'm a Bucks fan, give me a break). For me, there was nothing better than a Lakers-Celtics game in the spring time. Then an interesting thing happened. The greatest basketball player to ever lace up a pair of shoes that graced his own name came along, Michael Jordan. At first, this was great for the NBA, because most successful teams still played fundamentally good basketball. Then some of the previous greats started to retire. The NBA was faced with a future that sat squarely on joyriding shoulders, and they rode Jordan for all it was worth. I'm surprised they didn't rename the league the NJA during this time. The NBA got very rich riding Jordan.
Stern's brilliant marketing started a cancer in basketball, though. To many young kids, basketball was no longer a team sport. They didn't care about assists. They didn't care about shooting percentages. All they cared about was 35 points again and slamming a basketball with flare. From this generation we were to expect the next round of superstars. We haven't really gotten one, though. Why?
Even though Jordan could carry his team, he was still a team player. The current generation of NBA players are not team players. In fact, they are the most selfish athletes any sport has ever seen (with the possible exception of the PGA). These guys do not care about their team. They do not care about winning. They do not care about the communities they play in. All they care about is being the lead highlight on Sports Center, making big ching, smoking weed, and getting laid. This can be directly tied back to Stern's marketing of the NBA as an individual sport back in the 1990's. The cancer has spread its way from the NBA to college basketball, where it is almost unheard of for talented ball players to stay in school past their sophomore year, when if they did, they could actually enter the league as polished, mature professionals. It has spread back to high school basketball, where the talented kids know that if they play selfish ball and average 50 points a game, they'll get their payday without ever having to grace a college basketball court, cutting the maturity of NBA players even further.
Stern sold out the NBA in the 1990's. In doing so, the sport developed a cancer that has spread through out all of its levels. I'm not even going to go into this summer's disgrace at the Olympics, because that speaks for itself. Stern is ultimately responsible for charting the path for the NBA that resulted in Ron Artest in the stands, punching fans last night. It's time Stern fixes the NBA, or it's time he goes. The sport has a choice. It can take a short term hit in its popularity, and make the fixes necessary to put the game back on track, or it can witness more of these ugly events and watch its popularity slowly atrophy, at which point it will be a much longer climb back to the top of the mountain.
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