David Stern

David Joel Stern (September 22, 1942 – January 1, 2020) was an American lawyer and business executive who was the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1984 to 2014. Stern oversaw NBA basketball's growth into one of the world's most popular sports during the 1990s and 2000s. He is credited with developing and broadening the NBA's audience, especially internationally by setting up training camps, playing exhibition games, and recruiting more international players. In addition, with Stern's guidance the NBA opened 12 offices in cities outside the United States, and broadcast to over 200 territories in over 40 languages. Stern also helped found the Women's National Basketball Association and the NBA G League, the NBA's development league. Under Stern, the NBA launched their digital presence with NBA.com, NBA TV, and NBA League Pass. He also established the NBA's social responsibility program, NBA Cares.

Stern started with the NBA in 1966 as an outside counsel, then joined the NBA in 1978 as general counsel and became the league's executive vice president in 1980. He became commissioner in 1984, succeeding Larry O'Brien. After 30 years, Stern retired in 2014 as the longest-tenured commissioner in the history of major North American sports leagues (though his record has since been broken). He was succeeded by Adam Silver. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and FIBA Hall of Fame. Stern was on the Rutgers University Board of Overseers, a Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and chair of JALC's Marketing Committee, and was a Chair Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

David Stern was born in Manhattan, New York City, one of three children of Anna (née Bronstein, 1918–1990) and William Stern (1918–1980), a Jewish family. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and his father ran a Jewish delicatessen in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Stern grew up a New York Knicks fan, considered Carl Braun his hero, and attended games at Madison Square Garden with his father. He played basketball briefly in adulthood before sustaining a serious right knee injury during a New York Lawyers League game.

After graduating from Teaneck High School in 1959, Stern went to Rutgers University, where he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity and graduated in 1963 with a B.A. in history. He then attended Columbia Law School, receiving a J.D. in 1966.

After graduating from law school, Stern joined the law firm of Proskauer, Rose, Goetz & Mendelsohn (now Proskauer Rose), which has long represented the NBA. He was the lead attorney representing the firm in the case of Robertson v. National Basketball Association, the landmark lawsuit brought against the NBA by star player Oscar Robertson. Stern helped the league negotiate a settlement that allowed the NBA/ABA merger to proceed in return for the NBA abolishing the "option" clause in its uniform player contract and allowing players to become free agents for the first time.

In 1978, Stern left Proskauer Rose to become the NBA's general counsel under Commissioner Larry O'Brien. By 1980, O'Brien promoted Stern to be the NBA's executive vice president for business and legal affairs, which made Stern de facto in charge of marketing, television, and public relations for the league. During this time, Stern largely drove two landmark agreements with the NBA Players' Association: drug testing and team salary cap. An August 1980 report by the Los Angeles Times had estimated that 40 to 75 percent of NBA players used cocaine. The drug testing policy dealt with the perception that the NBA had a drug problem, which it admitted, and it was cleaning it up. The NBA was the first of the major sports leagues in North America to implement a drug testing policy. The salary cap created a revenue-sharing system where owner and player were effectively partners, with players receiving 53 percent of all revenues. Both of these agreements solidified Stern's standing inside NBA circles.

On February 1, 1984, Stern became the Commissioner of the NBA, succeeding O'Brien during the league's recovery from its darkest period. Instead of marketing the league's teams, he changed the focus to its star players, such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley from the 1984 NBA draft, which was held soon after Stern took office. Jordan's arrival, in particular, ushered in a new era of commercial bounty for the NBA. With him came his flair and talent for the game, and that brought in shoe contracts from Nike which helped to give the league even more national attention.

Stern guided the league through dwindling viewership en route to global growth. In his first year as commissioner, Stern offered Adrian Paenza, a South American basketball and soccer analyst, and the Argentina Channel 9 the rights to air weekly NBA highlights for $2,000 a year. In 1987, he started the shipping of VHS tapes from his New York office to China's state-run television station to expand the league's reach beyond North America. Stern pushed to allow NBA players to participate in international tournaments, contributing to the creation of the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, dubbed the "Dream Team", which begat the first wave of international NBA stars.