With Damian Lillard joining Giannis Antetokounmpo in Milwaukee, James Harden’s bickering with Philadelphia management, and the reigning champion Denver Nuggets reloading, plenty of uncertainty looms over the NBA at the tipoff of its 2023-24 season. While the on-court product is rife with the unknown, a certainty for the NBA is that it has established itself as a consistent No. 2 among American professional leagues behind only the NFL.
This season marks the 25-year anniversary of a time when uncertainty wasn’t a positive for the NBA and could have been downright disastrous at a pivotal juncture in its history.
Television audiences know all too well the pattern of a favorite series delivering a pitch-perfect season finale and then being let down upon the follow-up. Sometimes, an outstanding season finale would be better served as a series finale.
For as much as sports have become made-for-TV spectacles, leagues don’t have the luxury of simply moving on to another project after hitting the perfect note in the season finale. The NBA in 1998 is a prime example.
Michael Jordan’s walk-off jumper in Game 6 of the NBA Finals provided the quintessential cap on what could be described as the defining, 19-season run of a hit series. Nineteen seasons mark the stretch from 1979-80, when rookies Magic Johnson and Larry Bird arrived to give the struggling league a desperately needed boost.
The season before the Lakers added Magic and the Celtics picked up Bird ended with the Seattle SuperSonics beating the Washington Bullets in an NBA Finals. Seattle’s only championship drew the lowest TV share of any Finals in the time Nielsen tracked ratings for the series.
Conversely, two months earlier, Magic and Bird locked up in an NCAA Championship Game that garnered the highest TV rating in basketball history — a mark no game since has touched.
The Bird-Magic rivalry helped pull the NBA out of a public doldrum that included the NBA Finals airing on CBS tape delay. And while the duo started the transformation of the league, Michael Jordan’s arrival four years later was the necessary ingredient to catapult the NBA to another level.
Jordan’s role in growing the game to unprecedented popularity in the 1990s is well-documented, most notably in 2020’s The Last Dance.
Some supporting evidence of just how important No. 23 was to the league is maybe best evident in the 1994 Finals — an outstanding series that went to a nail-biting Game 7 and featured two of the all-time great big men in the game, Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon — averaging the lowest TV share since the Sonics-Bullets 15 years earlier.
That was the first Finals following Jordan’s first retirement. Coinciding with the New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks drawing the highest cable rating ever for a Stanley Cup Finals that same year, Sports Illustrated published a cover story declaring the NHL “Hot,” and the NBA decidedly “Not.”
The league certainly welcomed Mike’s return nine months later. And while it would be a discredit to Shaquille O’Neal making his first NBA Finals in 1995 as contributing to the league’s TV ratings rebounding, Jordan coming back unquestionably helped reinvigorate public perception.
So, with Jordan’s series-clinching jumper likely signaling his exit again, and more permanently this time, commissioner David Stern and Co. faced a potential existential crisis.
Worse yet, Jordan’s second retirement coincided with a lengthy lockout.
When the owners officially locked the players out on July 1, memories of Major League Baseball’s strike four years prior were still fresh. The World Series was canceled for just the second time in its history and the first time in 90 years.
The strike sabotaged the home-run record chase of San Francisco Giants All-Star Matt Williams, who had 43 dingers on Aug. 12 when the work stoppage began. It may well have sealed the fate of the long-struggling Montreal Expos, a franchise that had been to just one postseason — 1981, coincidentally another strike-shortened season — but which in ‘94 was the best team in MLB.
The Expos were never again as good as that 74-40 squad, and a decade later were bound for Washington D.C.
Most importantly, the ‘94 MLB strike dealt America’s Pastime a blow that ultimately led to it no longer being America’s favorite pastime. The 1995 World Series drew an impressive 19.5 average rating and 33 share on ABC and NBC per Baseball-Almanac, but never reached either number again in the subsequent 27 years of the Fall Classic.
What’s more, MLB game attendance dropped 20 percent after the strike.
That’s all to say if a sport that had embedded itself into American culture for the better part of a century could suffer from a work stoppage, another league less than two decades removed from tape-delayed championship telecasts and losing its transcendent main attraction could have faced devastation.
Consequences for the NBA wouldn’t necessarily be immediate; not financially, at least. An Atlanta Constitution column on the day the lockout began reported that the year’s portion of a $2.64 billion contract with NBC and Turner would be paid out regardless how long negotiations took.
Long-term, however, how might the league fare with its next contract?
Jordan’s last dance in Chicago left the TV show with the most monumental recasting decision since Shelley Long leaving Cheers.
Basketball brands and media attempted to prepare for Jordan’s departure throughout the 1990s by labeling any number of athletic wings Air’s Heir. In his All-American 1991-92 season at USC, Harold Miner was nicknamed “Baby Jordan.”
The closest he came to matching Jordan’s professional impact was winning a Dunk Contest.
Jerry Stackhouse and Vince Carter were each saddled with the Next Jordan burden at different points, in part for representing the same University of North Carolina program and all playing for Dean Smith.
Grant Hill came from Jordan’s rival program, Duke, and began his NBA career with the franchise that tormented MJ early in his Chicago Bulls tenure, the Detroit Pistons.
However, the dazzling Hill boasted a pedigree comparable to that of Mike: Both had iconic moments in the Final Four as freshmen en route to a national championship.
Each was an electrifying dunker, but more so a savvy playmaker who could do everything on the court with equal efficiency.
Hill was also a charismatic and easily marketable figure; hoopheads of the ‘90s remember “Grant Hill drinks Sprite!” as fondly as “It’s gotta be the shoes!”
It didn’t hurt that Hill was on course to perhaps become the best player in the world around the time the owners locked out the players. And, were it not for mounting injuries beginning in 2000, Hill may have ascended to such heights.
As for replacing Jordan, it’s a notion that Hill himself recently said “bothered” him during an appearance on fellow Duke alum J.J. Redick’s podcast.
Truth is, the NBA would never replace Michael Jordan. The 1998 NBA Finals did massive numbers, peaking with nearly 36 million tuned into Game 6. The series averaged a 33 share, which the Finals have never come anywhere close to replicating in a quarter-century since.
But beginning during the lockout, the NBA found an identity that’s at the root of its popularity as it tips off 25 years later.
A magazine cover shot during the lockout doubles as a mirror for the culture of basketball. In 2019, SLAM published an oral history of its March ‘99 edition and how it came together. And before the uninitiated ask, Is a magazine cover worthy of its own oral history?, the answer — or The Answer, as it were — is a resounding yes.
Fledgling SLAM wasn’t yet five years old when the lockout struck. A prolonged lockout could very well be a death knell for the upstart publication.
That the issue included retrospectives on the old American Basketball Association — and that the cover featured Allen Iverson holding a basketball patterned after the league’s iconic ball — harkened back to a grim time in professional hoops history from the perspective of public opinion.
But the stories told within, like Connie Hawkins’ career resurrection after being railroaded with allegations of shaving and Dr. J paving the way for superstars like Magic, Bird, and Jordan himself, served as reminders of the positives that can blossom in obscurity.
Iverson became a turn-of-the-millennium version. No player would ever be able to match the commercial appeal of Michael Jordan, but not many athletes have ever approached the cool factor Iverson brought with his fashion choices, commercials with Jadakiss rapping over his moves, and the tenacious demeanor he exuded on the court.
He’s the smallest Most Valuable Player ever at 6 feet, a generous listing. Iverson is probably closer to 5-foot-10, but it doesn’t matter because he played considerably bigger.
By the time Iverson became the MVP, two years after the lockout ended, the 76ers helped produce a strong 12.1 rating for the NBA Finals despite being overmatched by Shaq, Kobe Bryant, and the Lakers.
The NBA brokered a new television contract with Disney, announced seven months after the 2001 Finals, worth 25 percent more per year than the deal it had at the time of the lockout.
Perhaps most importantly, the league emerged after one perfect season finale with a change in direction that’s been to the NBA’s benefit in the quarter-century since.
