NBA New Commissioner Starts on 2/1

[Mustangs_Maroons]

Though not on college b-ball, thought it was interesting that after a long, long time, Stern will officially step down as commissioner this Sat (2/1), handing the reins to Adam Silver:

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/sport ... .html?_r=0

Part of the story is below.
1/25/14 - David Stern stepped into a conference room through a side door from his office. He carried a can of soda and a small plate of tortilla chips.
“My lunch,” he said on a recent weekday afternoon as he settled in to be interviewed jointly with Adam Silver, who will succeed him Saturday as N.B.A. commissioner.
Silver was late for the appointment. “Where’s Adam?” Stern said to Tim Frank, his senior vice president for basketball communications, after several minutes.
Frank went to check and returned. “On a call,” he said. Coincidence or not, the new order, at least symbolically, was upon us. After 30 years on the job, 48 over all in association with the league, Stern was all but officially done shepherding a growth enterprise with which he had become synonymous, or practically symbiotic. The transition of power seemed to have already occurred when Silver eased his tall, slender frame into a seat at the table perpendicular from Stern’s.

Asked how he preferred to be addressed, he said, “Adam, please.”

Not Commissioner Silver or Mr. Commissioner, as it has been with the leaders of the competing major sports, especially football and baseball.

“I’ll be Adam because David set the tone,” Silver said. “I think he enjoyed that sports fan relationship with other sports fans and I think they understood, even if they criticized him for certain decisions, that he was trying to do what he thought was in the best interests of the league, if not for an individual team.”

Silver added: “His dad owned a deli. He went to public school. He was a regular guy who was not born into this.”

In other words, Stern was not like at least some of the owners he has served — men who began life with a 15-point lead and less than two minutes to play — and once was not unlike many of the upwardly mobile players he governed. And even as the stakes changed along with the increasingly digitally connected world, and as the number of critics gained on his admirers, Commissioner Stern remained David to the news media, the unabashed point man for a once-withering product now awash in $5.5 billion in annual revenue.

As Silver finished his thought, Stern chimed in, “I used to say to people, commissioner is my job description, not my title.”

Yet one’s station in life, regardless of when it is achieved, opens doors to the proverbial next level. Stern, 71, was, in the 1970s, a rising star at the New York law firm Proskauer Rose, which provided legal counsel to the N.B.A. and created a way inside the sport he followed growing up across the Hudson River from Manhattan in Teaneck, N.J.

Silver, 51, spent much of his youth in Rye, north of New York City, the son of a Proskauer partner.

“My parents were divorced when I was young, and my father lived in the city,” he said. “One of the activities I would do with my father was going to Knicks games. Following the Knicks was part of my family DNA.”

He cheered for the 1970 championship team and wore Walt Frazier’s signature Puma Clyde sneakers. He went on to Duke, where he watched the likes of Mike Gminski and Eugene Banks. He was at Cameron Indoor Stadium for the debut season of the now-institutional Mike Krzyzewski.

After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Silver seemed to be following in the legal footsteps of his father. “I loved basketball, but I never dreamed about playing in the N.B.A. or certainly working for the N.B.A.,” he said.

The credentials and connections couldn’t have hurt after he wrote a letter to Stern seeking career advice. Silver joined the league in 1992 as Stern’s special assistant and subsequently became chief of staff, the senior vice president of N.B.A. Entertainment, and the deputy commissioner when Russ Granik left that position in 2006.

“We’ve been working intensely close for 22 years,” Stern said. “I’ve been giving him advice and he’s been giving me advice for over two decades. It depended upon the owners ultimately, but I thought he was the logical successor.”

Such is the rebuttal to the social media chatter about the commissioner’s office being too New York-centric, or even too Jewish. Support for Silver, according to league insiders, was widespread. His understanding of the business is unquestioned and his relaxed demeanor has long been cited as a perfect complement and now replacement for Stern’s more contentious nature.

[Harry0569]

First order of business: Abolish the divisions and just have it be the Eastern and Western Conference.

Second order of business: Have the 8-15 teams in each conference play a round robin to determine the 8th seed.

Third order of business: Fix NBA All-Star Saturday night.