Not the Oklahoma SuperSonics vs. the Seattle Clams.

David Stern is a weasle... maybe they take up the name Seattle Weazles to spite him?

Start that chat or bring signs...do what you can to bring to his attention NBA fans disgust over this.  

Just joking....I hope...

Great idea. Hope it happens.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the tremendous contribution that Stern has made to this league. He was more or less singlehandedly responsible for saving the NBA back in the early '80s when he took charge of a league beleaguered with drug scandals, empty arenas and financially strapped franchises. Seizing upon the opportunity afforded by the entry of Bird and Magic into the league, Stern cleverly decided to make stars and personalities the focus of the NBA's marketing strategy.

It worked very well. Bird, Magic, then Jordan made people care about the NBA again. But the over-reliance on stars as a means to bolster the league's sagging fortunes turned out to be a Faustian bargain. Referees were soon loath to make any calls that might shorten the floor time of the marquee names who were bringing fans into the arena. The dreaded "star system" of officiating was born and has remained a hallmark of the David Stern era.

Like many of you, I have come to despise the way in which star treatment has bastardized the fundamental rules of the game. I love watching LeBron play, but whenever he takes four steps on the way to the hoop, I snort milk out my nose.  The star system has long since served its purpose. There are now more than enough people who love the sport on its own merits. The stars may have been responsible for bringing them back to the arena in the '80s, but many of those same fans want to see a competitive, fairly officiated game when they go to a game today. They care about teams again and inevitably wind up frustrated and angry when they watch their team lose to the Lakers after Kobe went to the line 27 times because the guy guarding him had halitosis.

Yes, the star system has outlived its usefulness but David Stern just can't let it go. It's how he consolidated his power as Commissioner and won the lasting gratitude of the owners. At this stage of his tenure, he's certainly not going to do anything other than what has brought him so much of his success.

Nevertheless, I've learned to live with the star system as a fact of life in the NBA. My hatred of it has never reached the point where I strongly felt that Stern needed to go. Yeah, a new Commissioner with a fresh perspective would be ducky but I enjoy the current NBA game - flawed as it is - well enough that I could have easily continued to live with the status quo.

But Stern's enabling of (or downright collusion with) his buddy Clay Bennett's brazen theft of the Sonics from Seattle has shoved me firmly into the "Stern Must Go" camp. Maybe there was nothing that Stern or the league could legally do to prevent Bennett from carrying out his heist. But he could have at least used his bully pulpit as Commish to publicly condemn this crime. Yet not only did Stern remain silent, he has apparently signed off on the deal with a wink and a nudge toward his pal, The Clayster.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven and has irrevocably altered my perception of Stern. Formerly, I viewed him as something like a five term politician whose sclerotic policies while asphyxiating, fall short of being deadly. Now, I see him as a corrupt party machine boss whose toxic backroom dealings are in danger of fatally poisoning the lifeblood of the body politic - who, ironically in this case, are the very fans whose passion Stern had worked so hard to revive back in the 1980s.