NEW YORK (AP) – David Stern remembers the days when an NBA staff that numbered about two dozen was just trying to keep some teams in existence long enough to get them on national TV.
Now the former commissioner looks at a league whose 1980 championship series was not broadcast live but now has games televised around the world, whose players average more than $5 million a year in salary as the highest-paid team athletes in sports, and sometimes can’t believe he and his colleagues pulled it off.
“You can’t even do justice to everything that everybody has done,” Stern said in a phone interview. “All you can do is focus on small chunks of it, but it’s great fun to contemplate how the NBA family has pulled together to be at a place where our players are now at the top of the celebrity period.
“Pretty, pretty amazing and great.”
It helped to have marketable stars like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan.