Bulls & Bears: Stern's vision gave NBA the legs to shoot for more than hoops
Credit to Author: Gord Kurenoff| Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2020 21:19:36 +0000
It has been a powerful holiday season for the business of hockey — with the IIHF World Junior Championship down to an interesting final four of Canada, Finland, Russia and Sweden, and the NHL Bridgestone Winter Classic drawing 85,630 to the historic Cotton Bowl in Dallas on New Year’s Day (second only to the 105,491 who packed the Big House at Michigan in 2014).
It has also been a great few weeks for the NFL, which is on the cusp of its best post-season TV numbers in five years. The question that will take a month to answer is: Are we heading toward a rematch of Super Bowl XLVII and a showdown between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers?
The biggest loss this week in the business of sport was the death of former NBA commissioner David Stern, who died on New Year’s Day after being hospitalized by a brain hemorrhage on Dec. 12.
The tributes poured in from around the NBA and the global basketball community. And the tributes were powerful odes to a man who transformed the NBA from a league on the precipice of financial disaster in the mid-1980s to one that is now a solid No. 2 behind only the NFL among the juggernauts of professional sport in North America.
In what became a very public celebration of his life, Stern is clearly going down in history as a visionary who not only transformed professional basketball, but served as a beacon of best practices in sport business across all leagues in all sports. To some, Stern is the best commissioner in sport history.
He revolutionized pro sport by marketing the NBA around its star players. To this day, no one gets fan engagement, personality marketing and “athlete as entertainer” as well as the NBA does.
By focusing on teenagers and young adults, the NBA is consistently refuelling its fan base. Yet it also makes the NBA the league of choice for “young-thinking” adults of all ages.
Stern also seemed to anticipate globalization and the internet era by marketing the NBA internationally, making it the first major North American league to open regional offices in China and across Asia.
All of that was clearly before his time. So was the notion of leagues and franchises using cause marketing and philanthropy to build expansive community relationships among more than just hard-core fans.
Stern understood that the NBA could be more than just a sports league. It could be — and has become — a social agent for change.
Yet the most remarkable turnaround that Stern facilitated was taking the NBA from being an underserved regional TV player to the second-biggest national television platform in North America. You could count the number of national games the NBA had on one hand when Stern took over. Now, it airs five national games on Christmas Day alone and boasts US$2.66-billion in annual television revenues from ESPN and TNT.
And not even the NFL exports as much television programming around the world as the NBA garners.
Stern was human and made mistakes. Yet he made a point of owning most of those mistakes — including the relocations of the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Seattle Sonics — and that, more than anything, distinguishes him from other big-league sport commissioners.
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