I agree with so much on so many topics...but not David Stern.
David Stern is the devil for organized sport.
He basically ruined basketball during the first Lakers Celtics finals pitting it as Magic Johnson versus Larry Bird. The players were confused because that's not how either team played and both had all-star/HoF players on it from Kevin McHale, Robert Parrish to Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Jamaal Wilkes and others.
It became positively unbearable during the Jordan years.
The refereeing that CLEARLY gave preference to veterans and even more to stars made the game a joke where marketing actually had an outcome on the game.
Well, and there was the fixing by some refs...
Basketball got better almost instantly under the new Commish, Adam Silver, but unfortunately other sports started doing this.
I cringe when I see the NFL market a game as "Aaron Rodgers versus Tom Brady" because no one who plays thinks of the game like that.
I was a MASSIVE Laker fan as a kid. I mean, in 1985, I skipped school to sit in the parking lot of the forum and get two tickets for finals that year. The buddy I went with got the flu before the game and he was a stand up guy and sold his ticket to my dad for cost and I got to take my dad to an NBA finals game which the Lakers won in amazing Showtime fashion.
Honestly, I dunno which was worse in the late 90s... the "Iso" style of basketball or the NJ Devils "dump and hump" that took them to the Stanley Cup in '95 and dominated the NHL for a decade. Both were boring as sin and nothing like what made either sport great.
Basketball is an order of magnitude better as they reclaim the team part of "team sport", but I just haven't been able to recapture the love I had.
Stern was like other leaders like Michael Eisner and Roger Goodell... improved the finances while basically ruining the product and enjoying success in spite of rather than because of their leadership.
Sorry...David Stern is a thing for me...
Carry on.
