STERN TRANSFORMED NBA INTO GLOBAL POWERHOUSE
League’s former commissioner, dead at 77, stood alone in world of professional sports
It didn’t start well, the relationship between David Stern and Larry Tanenbaum.
As commissioner of the NBA, Stern was like the membership chairman of an upscale country club. If you wanted to be part of his exclusive league, you had to do it on his terms, his way, his rules.
In the beginning, all Tanenbaum wanted was an NBA team for Toronto. At the time, it wasn’t something in great demand.
Yet he wound up butting heads aggressively with the remarkable commissioner, who died on
New Year’s Day at the age of 77.
Tanenbaum tried to buy the Denver Nuggets in 1991 and move them to Toronto. That didn’t work or go over well with Stern. He didn’t want to lose the franchise in Denver, where it remains to this day.
He told Tanenbaum the New Jersey Nets were for sale. That didn’t seem to work out, either.
In the meantime, Tanenbaum pulled an end run of sorts on Stern. He tried to buy the San Antonio Spurs. He didn’t inform the commissioner of his actions. When he met in New York with Stern in 1992 to discuss the possible purchase, Tanenbaum didn’t realize he was walking into a storm.
“He was beside himself with anger,” Tanenbaum said years later.
Stern was used to having troubled franchises in his league. He had problems in Cleveland, San Antonio, San Diego, Denver, Utah, Indiana and Kansas City in his early years on the job. San Diego, the former Buffalo Braves almost Toronto franchise, moved to Los Angeles. Kansas City wound up in Sacramento. Over time, the Spurs became one of the signature franchises of the NBA.
And after Tanenbaum and others knocked on the door of a number of NBA opportunities, including the Indiana Pacers, Stern decided it was time to expand to Canada. He awarded franchises to Vancouver and Toronto. But, again, he did it his way. He wouldn’t allow Pro-line gambling on NBA games and made that an issue of acceptance. And when it seemed obvious that Tanenbaum would be awarded the franchise — at least that was the conventional thinking at the time — Stern passed on Tanenbaum and his partners in favour of John Bitove Jr.
The message at the time was rather clear: You do business our way or you don’t do business with us at all.
David Stern ran a phenomenal league in a phenomenal and occasionally singular way. There has been no one else like him in professional sport. The NBA was paddling in circles going nowhere when he took over as commissioner in 1984, and over the next 30 years he built the most popular sporting entity in the world.
The NBA championship trophy is in the name of Larry O’brien, Stern’s predecessor, but realistically, it should be in Stern’s name. He built this league. He was a magician: He turned nothing into something.
He was the voice of the game. He represented players, management, ownership, fans, in driving the NBA from a league that didn’t have its championship games broadcast live on television to one in which the biggest of stars are stars all around the globe.
Stern’s NBA began to change when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson transported their collegiate rivalry and made it mandatory viewing in North America. From Bird and Magic, there was Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley and now Lebron James, Kawhi Leonard, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant.
The $125 million that Bitove apparently overpaid for the Raptors in 1994 is now an NBA championship franchise worth close to or maybe more than US$2 billion, which is more than Cdn $2.6 billion.
Not everything was perfect under Stern, who adopted similar league-think policy that Pete Rozelle had previously utilized in building the National Football League. He succeeded in Toronto and failed in Vancouver. The negotiations he managed, doing the deal that brought China’s Yao Ming to the NBA, changed the league’s business forever.
In the early years of the Raptors, Bitove and broadcast billionaire partner Allan Slaight could no longer work together and that’s where Tanenbaum and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment came together in partnership to purchase the team. Tanenbaum has been the de-facto owner since then, even though he maintains a minority ownership to giant corporate partners Rogers and Bell.
The man Stern once read the riot act to later became a friend and respected colleague. On the passing of David Stern, the chairman of the board of the NBA just happens to be Larry Tanenbaum.