Stern’s Last Draft, One Perfect Brooklyn Boo
June 27, 2013. Barclays Center, Brooklyn. David Stern walks to the podium for the last time as NBA commissioner, and the crowd lets him have it — a wall of boos so thick you could spread it on a bagel. Stern, all 5-foot-nothing of him in a suit that cost more than my first car, doesn’t flinch. He leans into the mic and delivers the line: “Good evening, and thank you for that enthusiastic Brooklyn welcome.”
The place erupts. Not in cheers — in louder boos, mixed with the kind of laughter that means they know they’ve been had. That’s the clip making the rounds again this week, and if you’ve watched it once, you’ve watched it six times, because it’s a master class in owning a room that hates you.
This was Stern’s final draft. Thirty years of running the NBA, turning a league that showed Finals games on tape delay into a global behemoth, and Brooklyn sends him off with a chorus of jeers. That’s sports, pal. You build the house, they still boo you when you walk in. Stern didn’t just accept it — he feasted on it. The man had been getting booed at drafts since the Reagan administration. By 2013, it was a ritual, and he was the high priest.
The Brooklyn hostility carried extra weight that night. The Nets had just swung the blockbuster trade for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, mortgaging their future for a win-now window that would collapse spectacularly within three seasons. Fans were wired, emotional, and looking for a target. The commissioner — always a convenient lightning rod — walked into a perfect storm.
Stern announced the last first-round picks of his tenure that evening, closing out a draft that would yield Giannis Antetokounmpo at No. 15, Rudy Gobert late in the first round, and Anthony Bennett at No. 1 overall — the kind of pick that makes you grateful your GM isn’t the one making it. Hakeem Olajuwon, the first player Stern ever announced back at the 1984 draft, even showed up to shake his hand on the way out. Full circle, and the crowd still booed.
Adam Silver took over the following year and has been getting the same treatment ever since, though nobody’s quite matched Stern’s appetite for it. Silver grins and bears it. Stern seasoned it, chewed it up, and asked for seconds.
Stern died on January 1, 2020, at 77. The clip endures because it captures something the analytics crowd will never be able to quantify: the guy ran the league for three decades, took a forearm’s worth of grief every single June, and never once looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.