Former commissioner Stern set to enter HOF

Associated Press

NEW YORK

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.

But now comes an honor for the person most responsible for it.

Stern will be enshrined Friday in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, part of a 2014 class that includes former players Alonzo Mourning and Mitch Richmond, along with NCAA championship-winning coaches Nolan Richardson and Gary Williams.

Stern ended his run as commissioner after exactly 30 years on Feb. 1 — he won’t say retired, because he’s still working — and once thought he would wait five years for induction, same as players. Officials from the NBA and Hall of Fame persuaded him otherwise, and nobody is arguing that he belongs immediately.