Check out this hilarious conspiracy theory involving fellow Rutgers grad, David Stern, and Gary Bettman.
Everyone has a favorite conspiracy theory about the NBA. Some like the idea that David Stern fixed the 1984 draft lottery. Others favor his supposed secret suspension of a star player for gambling problems.I don't know about you guys, but this makes total sense to me. David Stern is so shrewd and Bettman is so inept, I'm sure this happened.
Mine dates back to the early 1990s, when the NHL was white hot with fans and never better on the ice. Wayne Gretzky was in Los Angeles. Mark Messier was with the New York Rangers, who were on the verge of ending their Stanley Cup drought. Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman, Ray Bourque, Patrick Roy and many others were hitting their prime.
Anyone who doesn't think hockey can work in America is forgetting this era. All of a sudden, hockey was challenging, if not beating, the NBA in a number of major U.S. markets – including New York. It's almost impossible to imagine now, but it happened.
As the conspiracy theory goes, Stern sensed the potential trouble in 1993 while the NHL was in search of a new commissioner. So he looked around his own office for someone so incompetent that if they got the job, the NHL would be marginalized by their mismanagement and never again be a threat to the NBA.
Naturally, Stern recommended one of his assistants, Gary Bettman, for the job.
True story or not, it worked.
Bettman is set to begin his 15th year as commissioner Thursday, and like most hockey fans I feel the need to mark the occasion by popping a bottle of champagne, chugging the entire thing in an effort to drown my misery and then smashing the empty bottle over my temple to black out the memories.
There has never been a commissioner of a major North American sports league this inept, yet the league's board of governors keeps employing him, keeps giving him another chance to sink this once-proud, once-vibrant league to new depths.
Bettman is on a 14-year run of bad ideas. His latest was a classic, moving the league's all-star game, which featured attention-grabbing young megastars, to midweek on the Versus Network – as opposed to NBC on a weekend. He claimed it would allow Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin to own the sports landscape, unlike some crowded weekend.
The result was a catastrophic 0.7 rating. That's a meager 474,298 households in the States that bothered to watch, down 76 percent from the last all-star game.
1 comment:
This makes perfect sense to me.
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