David Stern Is Retiring!!!!!

I finally understand how Dorothy felt after she killed the witch in the Wizard of Oz.  David Stern is retiring, hallelujah! We’re finally free from that smug arrogant ass hole! Wait, what’d you say? He’s not retiring till February 2014? Jesus Christ.  So for the next year and a half we have to witness the David Stern farewell tour?  It’s not enough that ESPN spends too much time showering the insufferable superstars of the NBA with praise now we need to watch them give David Stern credit for everything good that has happened in the last 30 years.  “David Stern invented the Internet, Google, and Facebook!”  

Stern inherited the NBA with better circumstances than Clinton inherited the presidency.  Sure Bill was in the White House during the dotcom boom but look at everything that happened in the NBA the first four months of his tenure.  The Lakers and the Celtics, Magic vs Bird, squared off in arguably the greatest NBA finals of all time.  It was a thrilling seven game series where the two biggest names in the league faced off. But wait there’s more! The top five picks of the ’84 draft included Jordan Barkley and Olajuwon. That’s the most dominant player in NBA history, one of the best power forwards in NBA history, and arguably the best center in NBA history all within the first couple months of his tenure.   

On top of walking into the best situation possible his whole tenure is clouded with conspiracy theories.  First you have him fixing the 1985 draft so the best player (Patrick Ewing) goes to the biggest market in the lottery (New York).  Then you have the whole referee conundrum that I don’t really want to go into huge detail with because I’ll go on forever but let me just say the fact that the man TimDonaghy called as much as his bookie (Scott Foster) is still officiating games is despicable. Then this last year there is controversy that he rigged the draft so that the team the NBA currently owns gets the number one pick in the draft.  While this claim is based solely on speculation but the way he handled that Jim Rome interview was atrocious (once again I’m goning to end this here because I could write a whole blog on this alone).  If he is that upset by speculation like this why not just show the ping-pong balls getting dropped on live TV like mega millions?

David Stern is an arrogant prick and while he didn’t screw up bad enough to do any damage to the league he certainly did not turn water into wine.