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NBA GLOBAL GAMES MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 10, 2013David SternDAVID STERN: Thanks, everyone, for coming. I really want to just start off few thank yous. First to Hans Sy, who's been a great partner together with us and the SM Group for making this possible, to our partners at SOLARtv that have been so supportive of the NBA for the last dozen years or so, to the Houston Rockets and the Indiana Pacers for their cooperation in making this such an important event for us, and most importantly for us, to the great fans of the Philippines, who have made these two teams seem so much at home that it is truly exhilarating to watch the interaction between both teams and the fans. The players are virtually overwhelmed by the knowledge and generosity of the fans here in Manila. Those are my remarks. Q. You mentioned the NBA has been aware of the strong basketball culture here in the Philippines for at least a dozen years, probably a bit longer even. How do you see the country fitting into the NBA's global strategy going ahead, and can it be as important as some of the other partners with maybe larger economies? DAVID STERN: Well, you know, the Philippines has a population of 100 million or so, so they're a very important part of our Southeast Asian strategy, and we're using what we've learned here to take further steps here. We're working very hard to develop retail stores, to develop an NBA Cafe, and to further develop our relationship with SOLAR. And we've been doing events here, Junior NBA, Junior WNBA clinics and the like, NBA Cares. So we're moving, I think, to a more year‑round approach to this market, and it's going to be an important pole in our Southeast Asia tent. We're looking now at doing Junior NBA and Junior WNBA and Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and I would hope that we will have the region covered by the beginning of the season with television in all those countries. So the Philippines is a very important market to us, and it is the most intense and robust and knowledgeable basketball market. I was going to say outside of the U.S., but it may lead the world; I'm not sure. Q. Three of the last four teams in the most recent Playoffs, the Indiana Pacers, Spurs and Memphis, many consider them to be small market teams. Now in a league where most free agents want to go to big market teams like LA and New York, how proud are you that the smaller market teams were successful? DAVID STERN: Yeah, I am and have been very committed to having a league that can support what are historically so‑called small markets. That's a function of the collective bargaining agreement and the way we do revenue sharing. But I'm very proud that from Portland to Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Memphis, San Antonio, Indiana, Orlando, they're all doing well. I think that the wanting to go someplace is getting to be a little bit of a myth. I think our players are demonstrating, and I think it's wonderful, they want to go someplace where they can win. It used to be that Miami was a small market. It's only 16th in a league of 30. But when LeBron went there, it suddenly got very big, and now everyone says, oh, yes, Miami is a great place to go. No one was rushing to Miami, but LeBron made a judgment that with D‑Wade and Chris Bosh and him, they would have a chance to win. And I think that Oklahoma City, by re‑signing their stars, demonstrated that, and San Antonio is the same thing. To me we have a league where management is what is going to win and going to do well in business, and I'm very proud of that situation. Q. What do you see as your legacy as you transition to a different role, and what are your expectations of Adam Silver as the next commissioner? DAVID STERN: The secret is, actually, that Adam has actually been commissioner for the last 10 years, I just never gave him the check. (Laughter.) We've worked so closely for most of the‑‑ for all of the 22 years that he will have been associated with the NBA by the time I step down. He understands all aspects of our business. He's made several key business decisions. He works with our broadcast partners. He works with the teams. He works on the basketball side some. So I expect that he'll make his own decisions; that's the beauty of having fresh ideas perhaps and a fresh CEO. But it's pretty clear that the future of the NBA is going to involve at a minimum two things that are very important. The first is digital, and that's an area in which Adam excels, digital/social media, and globalization, where the international side has reported to Adam for some time. So I just expect that my legacy is the people of the NBA. My legacy is this extraordinary force of people that are at our teams and at our league office and at the offices of NBA internationally, they're poised to do even better things. And to me that's the best legacy that you can have. Q. To what degree do events like these, has it now brought return on this investment over the past 20 years, bottom line return on the investment, or to what degree is that not the purpose? DAVID STERN: No, oh, no. I think that the business of the NBA on an international basis is a profitable and growing business. These games are in support of that business. They're usually marginally profitable, and they're quite extraordinarily difficult to undertake, but they're our attempt to grow the game, for people to see the game in action, for there to be clinics around the game, and to give support to the markets in which we play or other markets surrounding them in the same time zone that we're serious about bringing this sport to the greatest number of people. And the fact that we've played games thus far in Istanbul, Bilbao, Manchester, England, tonight here, soon to come, Taiwan, Rio and Beijing and Shanghai, and then in the regular season in London and Mexico City is really in support of our burgeoning international efforts, and it is profitable and it is growing in its profitability. This year, for example, in addition to our 215 countries and territories and 47 languages, we're going to have 20 localized NBA.com sites by the time the season launches. So that's a big deal for us. It used to be one, then it was five, then it was 10, and we keep growing. So I see this growing, continuing to grow, and increasingly, for example, League Pass Broadband International is something that will continue to grow as the cell phone revolution includes 90 percent smartphones that are able to receive all types of NBA programming. Q. Speaking for the millions of Filipino followers of the NBA, do you believe that a Filipino can play in the NBA just after Yao Ming of China and Jeremy Lin of Taiwan? DAVID STERN: You tell me. This is a country that has qualified for the World Cup. It's qualified its junior team for the World Cup. It's about, I suppose, commitment and growth, but that's an individual question. It's about sacrifice, discipline, hard work and teamwork. And increasingly what you're beginning to see is that our players don't just make it to the league because they're great athletes; they work very hard; they practice, practice, practice. In the summertime they go to their own training regimen, they go to different places where they work with other players. It's hard to get here, and it's hard to stay here, and it's a tribute to all the hard work of our players. I'm sure there are Filipino athletes that will be competent and capable of playing in the NBA. It's going to depend upon how committed they are to making that next step. Q. Not many people know, but you sent incoming Commissioner Adam Silver 13 years with Ahmad Rashad to the Philippines‑‑ DAVID STERN: I remember when he came here. Q. On a scanning mission. What was the NBA looking for when you sent them here? What were you trying to look for in this market 13 years ago? DAVID STERN: Well, you said 13 years ago? Q. Yeah, I think 1996, thereabouts. DAVID STERN: You know, we actually‑‑ where's Carlo? We had a Filipino telling us, you'd better get more people in the Philippines, and so we were like, let's get more people in there. We had Ahmad Rashad and Adam came, and they came back and told us what we already knew, which is this is one heck of a market, that we had heard about, we had read about. I knew that then‑Senator Jaworski was quite the player in the Philippines. I met with successive commissioners who always came through New York, but they came back and said, you're not going to believe it; it's all true. And so we've been, from our office in Hong Kong, which covers Southeast Asia, I would say that the Philippines is just about our most successful market, and it's got very important plans for growth, as well. Q. How hopeful can the Filipino fans be of the NBA coming back perhaps next year or later this year, not only for a preseason game but maybe a regular season game? DAVID STERN: Yeah, I wouldn't be that hopeful, okay, because, number one, we‑‑ regular season games are hard. They're much more expensive to mount. There are different competitive situations. I like the use of the word friendly as I see football teams all around the world playing friendlies all around the world, and I think the friendlies work fine for us. But it's fully my expectation that we'll be back in Manila, but you'll have to ask Commissioner Silver about that. I'm going to leave an envelope that says "go to Manila," and I hope he'll open it. (Smiling.) Q. I'd just like to ask, what quality or qualities do you think someone should possess to become a successful pro league commissioner? DAVID STERN: Oh, I have no idea. (Laughter.) I learned on the job. If you are relatively intelligent and you're prepared to work around the clock and you're ready to do anything that's necessary to fight off people who would damage your league and you love the game and you're determined to see it grow, not only in your own country but around the world, I think you're ready to be commissioner. And we've moved to a time‑‑ I grew up in this business when it was helpful to be a lawyer. I think lawyers have certain issue‑spotting skills that are helpful now, but I think that other skills like understanding media, understanding globalization and being very, I think, attune to helping our players grow as people are very important skills to being commissioner. I must say that I have always believed and believe it even more firmly now that international travel is an important factor in the education and growth of our players. They see the impact that they have on fans around the world. They understand they're part of something bigger, and they also understand what enormous opportunities there are for them. In the old days NBA players used to, at the end of their careers, used to go to Italy. I saw Bob McAdoo in Italy when he was 39. I thought his arm was going to fall off because he could still throw it up there. But now our players know that they can go around the world, and I think their eyes are being opened to the opportunities for them and for the enormous attention that's being paid to the game that they play. And that's a very important growth factor for them. Q. The question is about globalization. We've been reading that there may be plans in the future of possibly having a division in Europe or maybe even NBA‑branded leagues in Asia. How far deep is the study of the NBA into those areas? DAVID STERN: I would say that the possibility of NBA division in Europe is‑‑ we always like to say 10 years. I said that 10 years ago, so we're in a new 10‑year cycle. But I think it's a distinct possibility, I really do. The NBA either leagues or competitions in Asia, it's something that we're studying more carefully than you might think, not so much with NBA teams but with NBA‑sponsored competitions with partners. We think that that's another way to extend the focus on our sport, because at bottom what we're trying to do is to get more and more kids playing our game. This is a particularly good time for basketball because governments are beginning to understand that kids should move and not be fighting diabetes, obesity, incurring large healthcare costs, and there are other values to the game that they can pick up. That's why, for example, we're in the middle of starting a program in India to introduce a million and a half Indian kids to basketball. No profit attached to that. There will be down the road, but we're trying to grow the game and its values, and so I think that that applies all over, and we understand that an adjunct to that, sort of to follow up on an answer to a question asked earlier, is that games are important, some kind of games, to show us in the regions where we're trying to expand the game. Q. Following up on that last question a little bit, if you can look ahead 10 years from now and you're looking back from your feather bed of retirement, how has the NBA maybe in your fantasies, how will it have changed most dramatically? DAVID STERN: You mean in the next 10 years? Q. If you're looking back 10 years from now. DAVID STERN: You know, it's interesting, if you had asked me 30 years from now when we were talking about putting‑‑ we were just removed from primetime tape delay; our revenues were $125 to $200 million; that we would have 30 teams; that they would all be playing in new or completely remodeled arenas; that over‑the‑air television and a few million cable homes would turn into 500 channels and multiple sports channels; that sports marketing starting with Michael Jordan and Nike would be its own sort of division of spending and promotion; and I couldn't have focused on either the internet, because it didn't exist, with streaming and NBA League Pass, or globalization. So if that's the case, I think anyone who sort of projects something is going to be wrong. To me what we've done for the last 30 years, and I'm sure Adam will continue to do, is sort of chart a general course and then be opportunistic when opportunities present themselves, and that's what we've always done. We were opportunistic when FIBA walked in the door and said we'd like you to come to the Olympics. We said, okay. It wasn't some part of some grand design that we thought we had. They said we would appreciate it if you would honor us by having your players compete against us. You know, you may remember that people thought it was ludicrous that we would do that because our basketball was so good that we would always be the best. Of course 10 years later, the U.S. lost in the World Championships in Indiana, came in sixth, with a pretty darned good team as I recall it. Go check the roster. It was an All‑Star roster. So I just can't predict, and I think that is an enormous opportunity that is very much on the front burner for us. We went early into Europe because its basketball seemed further developed with a Lega in Italy and the ACB in Spain, and even now with the Euroleague, but there's a lot of important activity going on in Southeast Asia. Q. What do you think NBA has done in bringing out the best in a player when they prove that they deserve to be in the league, like what happened to Jeremy Lin, who was once overlooked but now has become an inspiration to many? DAVID STERN: So refine that question a little bit more for me. What we did to develop Jeremy Lin? Q. What do you think the league has done to bring out the best in them? DAVID STERN: You know, the system really works. Jeremy Lin was overlooked. Some people think it was because he was Asian and others think it was because he went to Harvard, okay. Take your choice. But one of the things we've done, which I'm equally proud of, and its importance will emerge in future years as the discussions about the NCAA and its relation to the NBA heat up, is that we have a full‑fledged development league, NBA development league that has 17 teams now, and my guess is by 2015 it'll be 20 teams. And that's a place where players who were just the last cut, rather than looking overseas, get an opportunity to play in an improved setting where their tapes‑‑ or actually not so much their tapes, streaming of their games keeps them in the attention span of our NBA teams, and that's what happened with Jeremy Lin, that's what happened with Steve Novak, and now with Reggie Jackson playing so well for Oklahoma City, I think he may have led them in scoring in the Istanbul game, he was playing for their Tulsa NBA D‑League affiliate, which has the same system as the Thunder do. So I'm very proud of the development league. It truly did develop in some way, in a little different way, Jeremy Lin. And I think that's working. And also the quality of the league has gone up because our teams can now assign players who are either injured or have been in the league up to three years. So that march is continuing, and I think that the development league is going to be an important place, even more important, and as the drum beats that I hear about our colleges not liking what they refer to as one‑and‑done, we now have a league in the NBA development league that will accept players when they're 18 and will do, I might say, a better job of educating them than the college programs in which they are. And you know what's interesting? That remark is going to be headlines in the U.S. or at least an interesting point because the world is a very small place. It doesn't matter where I say anything. I can get in trouble in any country in the world. Q. Since you're here, has anybody called you or sent you feelers about Filipino would like to own a minority stake or a major stake in an NBA franchise? DAVID STERN: Not since I'm here, but I'm always selling, and we're always shopping, and we're always looking for investors who are interested in the NBA. And I have some meetings with some people who could probably fit that bill, and that will be accomplished here, just sort of a meet‑and‑greet and see how things go. But I fully expect that international entrepreneurs of high net worth are increasingly going to be potential investors in NBA teams. It's begun, but I think it's going to intensity as these assets become more valuable and more visible. Q. Is 30 teams the right number right now for the NBA, or are you guys still looking into maybe expansion? DAVID STERN: Not right now. I think we have some owners who think that the right number is probably 28 or some lower number than 30. I think it's conceivable at the margins that there might someday be as many as 32, but I just don't know. I don't want to step on Commissioner Silver's lines by saying that he should consider like some combination of Las Vegas and Seattle, because that would put too much pressure on him. But I think that it's for now exactly the right number. I've never been in favor of reducing teams. In fact I've worked my entire career, long before I was commissioner, to keep the same number that we had. I've been in a courthouse ready for bankruptcy filings and always thought that was a bad idea as we tried to push the league ahead. I'm very, very sanguine about 30 teams and the current format. Q. The league has had so many exhibition games since the late 1980s, McDonald's Open, Europe Live Tour. What has changed between then and now in terms of holding exhibition games? Has the competition gotten stronger or anything? DAVID STERN: You know, I think our number, we've probably played‑‑ people don't know this. As a league, we've probably played 160 games outside of the United States in our history. Q. Including the games we're playing now it's going to be 148. DAVID STERN: 150. We've played a lot of games. Sometimes those games felt like a shot in the dark. All right, let's try this, let's see how it goes. Now that we've designated these as the Global Games and we're playing eight and then two regular season games, there seems to be a kind of momentum that has developed in a positive way that our fans around the world very much appreciate the efforts that we've been continually making. And they're beginning to put it into context. Not that many people realize that we played the first regular season games outside of the United States of any sports league in 1991: The Phoenix Suns and the Utah Jazz, okay. You haven't lived until you've been in an elevator with Mark Eaton and the door opens up and a Japanese fan looks up and almost faints at the size of Gulliver in the elevator. But we've been all over. We went to the Soviet Union with the Hawks in 1988; we had the Chinese national team as our guests in '85; the Nets and the Phoenix Suns went to Italy in '84. We've been doing it, but now it's really in a much more coordinated way in support of a growing business, and our fans seem to really be getting it and are very appreciative of what we're doing. And we're feeling very good about that. Q. Do you see basketball eventually overtaking football in terms of popularity in the next few years? DAVID STERN: No, no. I think that football has a grip on the world that should be both admired and respected. But it's okay to be number two all over the world. There's a lot of room for growth, you know, especially in new markets. I think it's fair to say that in the Philippines, basketball is the number one sport, and I think it's also fair to say in China, which is pretty large, we're sort of‑‑ might be the number one, together perhaps with ping‑pong and soccer, but I think we're doing well. You know, in India with its 1.2 billion people, cricket is not sport, it's religion. An IPL game between the Delhi Daredevils and the Mumbai Indians, and it was incredible. It's a three‑hour game now in this Twenty20 that they have. It was seen by 10 million people in India, 10 million televisions, and we're on the same network, Sony, and we were probably seen by 100,000 people. But that gives us a lot of room for growth, and it's fun to contemplate. But will we ever be number one in India? Never. Will we grow substantially in India and around the world? Absolutely. So the ranking is less important than the opportunity, and actually with football, I think we'll all be stressing the values of sports, which is a good thing, too. Q. Will you be open to granting hosting rights of the All‑Star showcase outside the U.S. and Canada since a regular season game is ruled out because of the competition? DAVID STERN: Was the question would I be open to having All‑Star Game outside of the United States? Q. Yes, sir. DAVID STERN: You know, it's interesting, we have so many NBA cities that are now lining up for All‑Star that it's hard to say no to them, because we're now committed through New York and Brooklyn is one, and then Toronto, and there were many other applications, as well, that I'm not sure. And it would require a completely different configuration because right now we have All‑Star where we have teams playing, albeit near the All‑Star city on a Thursday night, and then they go to All‑Star and they resume on Tuesday. If we were to play internationally, that would require a different configuration even of All‑Star, and you know, maybe that's a good idea. That's for a new idea. Maybe we get set in our ways and we're not looking at broader possibilities. That may be why it's a good idea to have a changeover in leadership, as well, you know, because I think that there are other opportunities that my successor will have the ability to consider and say, I don't know why that other guy didn't consider it, but we're going to do it now. So I'm looking forward to watching it, and actually to participating in it because as I've told the owners and I've told Adam, that certainly with respect to the international expansion of the game, anything that I can do to be helpful, I'm ready to do, because I think that international is an enormous opportunity that we have just put the structural pieces together for, and the growth is going to zoom in the future. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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