David Stern Lashes Out at Players

NEW YORK — With the latest news concerning the NBA coming down, David Stern has pulled a 180 and reacted very negatively, not unlike that of a teenaged girl, to the point where it’s not even funny to soak in his comments, it’s getting abbrassive and offensive.

Stern is a politician. He’s smart in the ways the he is an idiot.

By this I mean Stern has been on a power trip the past few months, tossing out threats like pizza crusts. Now that the players have realized his threats are empty, they are starting to stand up and defy him, publicly no less. So what does Stern do? He publicly retorts in an oh-so typically political way.

Stern went on ESPN yesterday to basically belittle the players, his bitterness was dripping from every word he lashed out at them. He called them names without directly calling them names and called their stance pathetic with — well I think he was pretty blatant with that.

But the thing is, Stern is digging himself a hole that he doesn’t know about. He is trying to get a last ditch threat effort in but no one is going for it.

I’ve long said I chose to be a sports writer because not only did I no longer possess the skills to be anywhere near good, but because political writing would be such a heated debate everyday it would take years off my life. Now some could argue sports does the same thing to my life expectancy as politics does but in a different matter, the parallels between the two worlds are unavoidable.

Stern is ripping on the players the way a lot of political figures rip on each other: brainlessly. He’s a living, breathing fallacy machine and it’s hard to believe it’s actually happening. And the fact that ESPN let him off with cookie dough questioning was all the more disparaging.

Stern called the player’s threat to decertify a ‘negotiation tactic’.

Did David Stern hit his head this morning? Or does he love Drew Barrymore so much he’s portraying her fictional character in 50 First Dates in the real world?

Is he that bad at short term memory or am I giving him the benefit of the doubt and it turns out he’s actually and idiot? How can he sit there, straight faced, and call the player’s first legitimate threat in these talks a negotiation tactic?

Of course it’s a negotiation tactic! But so was threatening to cancel the season four times before you sliced off the first two weeks. Of course the player’s threat is a negotiation tactic, so was saying if the players didn’t accept the latest deal the deals would only get worse.

I imagine Stern says a lot of things in passing. I imagine that in these debates it’s a lot of him getting up and leaving the room at the end of the talks, shrugging his slimy shoulders and going “I don’t know guys…” and then attaching a false dichotomy to the whole thing.

The whole entire lockout has been a false dichotomy, it’s just ultimatum after ultimatum and they’ve all been coming from Stern. And now that they players are calling his bluff, he tries to spin it all on them?

It’s truly sad to see the lockout come to this. I want basketball, but I want to see Stern and the owners get theirs now. The games aren’t on the courts, their in them now, or will be shortly. And that’s fine, cancel the season, we’re going to have one net year anyways.

But in the meantime, those of us who are being deprived of the game can kick back and watch an alternate NBA season, where it’s the owners versus the Players. Guess who we’re rooting for? They’ll not only lose the revenue from this season but have to pay the players upwards of $6 Billion in damages.

And with that being the case, Stern is really going to scoff at that and try to fight it out? He’s willing to gamble anywhere from $2-6 Billion over fractions of percents?

No wonder the NBA is in a financial crisis, there’s no need to spin those number doc, they speak loudly enough for themselves.