Good article on the now arrived "Silver Age" of the NBA

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New commissioner, new rules.
David Stern is from the Napoleon Bonaparte/Danny Devito school: small man, big impression. He may not be large, but he's gargantuan.

On the flight to New Orleans for the first Sternless All-Star Game of my career I had a fleeting thought: Was All-Star possible without Stern? Or, for that matter, was the NBA? Maybe Stern was everything. CEO-as-bedrock.

So it's no surprise the lion's share of the news that Adam Silver is the new NBA commissioner has been built around the idea that Stern stepped down after three decades. Stern's absence has been the real headline. To the extent Silver has been defined it has generally been vs. Stern -- for instance, he's taller, younger, more of a consensus-builder etc.

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