How the NBA made basketball into pure magic
Every spring, basketball fanatics (and novices with major FOMO) try their hand at building a bracket for the NCAA’s March Madness. Whether you irrationally picked your hometown to go all the way (looking at you, Buffalo) or you’re eagerly awaiting your office bracket winnings, the Final Four tomorrow night will be exciting all the same.
To celebrate our love of basketball, KindredCast is looking back at Episode 10, featuring an in-depth interview with David Stern, who served as the National Basketball Association Commissioner for 30 years and is widely recognized for popularizing the NBA during the 1990s and 2000s.
Here are just a few things we learned:
1. For David, the “Magic” happened when he realized he was a brand manager.
Previously an NBA executive, David Stern became Commissioner in 1984, and it hardly feels like a coincidence that Michael Jordan joined the league that very same year.
When David became Commissioner, he thought he was in charge of events. “I was overseeing 20 some odd theme parks with licensing arrangements, and television arrangements, and commercial uniforms and things like that,” David said. “Based upon reading and other things, realized I was what was probably a brand manager, which was sort of phase two. Then I think it became clear to me that the role had evolved into one, where we were…curators of enormously valuable content.”
If you went back in time and attended an NBA game in the 1970s, you would realize just how much David has changed the consumer experience. As the “king of monetization,” he transformed the old war memorial arenas of the time into entertainment palaces, with club seating and an array of quality restaurants.
2. David made television history.
Just as he transformed the live event experience, David was also part of the transformation of televised basketball. In the transition from the existence of just a few major broadcast networks to the explosion of cable television with hundreds of channels, David brokered the NBA’s first deal with USA Network. Kay Koplovitz, the founder and CEO of USA Network, agreed to pay the magnificent amount of $400,000 per year for cable rights, with “a penny a sub per subscriber.”
Back in 1979, the NBA received roughly $1 million per team in revenue. “Now each team gets on average, on the last deal made in 2014, of $84 million. It was a good run,” David said. “It was reflective of the renewed valuation of sports rights that people realized that if you want to aggregate an audience you start with the Super Bowl, which probably has 15 of the top 20 or maybe even more events, and look at the Academy Awards or other one time events like that, singular events, and sports was the place where you can gather audiences live.”
3. The NBA is like family.
David’s success was not only rooted in his innovative skills in branding the NBA, but fostering the personal brands of superstars like Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Charles Barkley.
But even as he cultivated the stardom of these young men, they were always family first. This ethos rings true through social programs like NBA Cares and has carried David through difficult times, like when Magic Johnson announced in 1991 that he had contracted HIV. “He was one of us,” David said. “We used a word that people thought was kind of corny, but we were a family. All families are dysfunctional. They’re just dysfunctional in different ways, but we were the NBA family. He was a member of the family, and just because a beloved relative was dying of cancer, you don’t say, ‘My God, you shouldn’t have smoked.’ You embrace him, and you nurse him, and then you finally say goodbye on the right terms. That’s what drove me with respect to Magic.”
—
Learn more about the NBA, from brand to family, on Episode 10 of KindredCast, featuring our interview with David Stern, embedded below or available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
