Up For Grabs : Jordan Is Gone, the Bulls Are Done and Road to the NBA Title Starts With a 50-Game Sprint

Well, it ain’t your usual season opener, is it?

You may have noticed they’re starting in February 1999, rather than November 1998. Players won’t be complaining about the grind of 82 games over six relatively leisurely months, but 50 in three torturous ones.

And something else seems to be missing . . .

Oh yes, it’s the entire Chicago Bulls dynasty, which led the league to its ‘90s zenith, when the NBA finals began beating World Series TV ratings and its network TV package more than doubled baseball’s.

The Bulls have been scattered across the landscape, Scottie Pippen to Houston, Luc Longley to Phoenix, Steve Kerr to San Antonio, Dennis Rodman to the late-night talk-show circuit, Michael Jordan to. . . .

Retirement?

Say it ain’t so, Mike! This is just another one of your head fakes, isn’t it, like that Globetrotter trick you pulled on James Worthy in the ’91 finals, when you waved the ball, he jumped, you pulled it back down and zoomed to the hoop before he landed? You’ll just take up golf or become a NASCAR driver (anyone who has seen you behind the wheel knows it wouldn’t be such a stretch), and return in a year or two, huh?

Or maybe not. Probably not. Almost certainly not. Jordan came back the last time at 31, but a season or two out would make him 37 or 38, with no Bulls contender to return to. The odds are, the days of the MBA (Mike Basketball Assn.) are gone and David Stern is left with his old NBA.

You want to talk about your rebuilding programs, coming out of the first labor action in league history to cancel a game, much less three months’ worth, without its Guiding Light. . . .

The struggle with the players (and, more to the point, their agents) was a challenge Stern thought he had to accept, a fight he couldn’t avoid and a showdown he had to win. Having survived, this gnarled season becomes the price he has to pay.

It isn’t a matter of whether his league will take a hit, only of how devastating and how long.

Optimists think it won’t be that bad. Pessimists think the league could go back into the hole it crawled out of when Magic Johnson and Larry Bird arrived in 1979.

Stern has tried to cushion the blow of Jordan’s exit for years, trumpeting his young stars. Because so many have turned out to be hypes, discipline problems and, in one case, the next thing to a felon, NBA youth isn’t yet the comfort it may become.

In an attempt to assess the NBA’s future, we have convened our own panel of experts, none beholden to Stern: Leigh Steinberg, the agent for so many NFL stars; Neal Pilson, a New York-based consultant who used to be head of CBS Sports; and Rick Burton, director of the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center.

To make a long story short, they agree the NBA has solid fundamentals that haven’t gone away.

Steinberg, who has grown rich representing star quarterbacks such as Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Warren Moon and Drew Bledsoe, has begun branching out into basketball (his office now has John Starks, Toby Bailey, J.R. Henderson and Miles Simon) and intends to continue.

Steinberg says recent events add up to a “double-barreled shotgun, leveled at basketball’s heart,” but expects it not only to survive, but to thrive.

“Ultimately, we would like to do more,” he says. “As football was married to the emergence of television in the ‘60s, as football highlights caught the rhythm and the beat of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and still maintain that, that’s what basketball has done in the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

Here are the factors the panelists feel will buoy the league in the stormy seas to come:

Popularity

In an age in which even the NFL has to run programs to encourage kids to play its sport, when insurance rates and equipment costs weigh down high school football programs, when baseball must try to revive its game in the inner city that once furnished so many of its elite players, the NBA has no such initiatives.

It doesn’t need them, here or abroad.

“Basketball has an inherent advantage,” Pilson said. “It can be easily played and it’s played everywhere in the United States. All you need is a court and a basketball.

“You don’t need 11 guys to play, you can play two-on-two and one-on-one.”

Being Hip (Hop)

Purists complain about NBA touches--the mascots, the laser shows, the ear-splitting rock ‘n’ roll, the Utah Bear riding his @#$%&*! motorcycle onto the floor, until the league had to institute decibel levels before it began harvesting class-action suits brought by deafened fans. . . .

But, the pros say, in an MTV age, it works.

“The key is,” Steinberg says, “they tapped into a 1980s and ‘90s rhythm and mentality among younger sports fans that hadn’t been touched yet.

“In the production values, they emphasized short, quick bursts of action, color, fast cutting . . . great editing and production values, set to music and the use of images, [that] tapped into a generation that was used to that kind of presentation. In combination with the shoe companies that were pushing the same theme, they presented basketball in a clearly hipper, more-in-fashion style than the other sports did . . .

“Then you have the basic nature of the sport itself. In football and baseball, the players wear uniforms. In football, their faces are covered.

“In basketball, the whole body is there and can be seen. There’s a much more intimate relationship with a player from a spectator [standpoint], either on television or in the stadium, than there is with football, baseball or hockey.

“In addition, you only have five players on the court, so one player in five can dominate in a way where it’s hard for one player out of 11. It’s a sport that way, where you can focus on the individual.”

Demographics

Advertisers like vehicles that deliver young viewers, the keys to lifelong consuming habits, and women, which suggests crossover appeal into a wider audience.

The NBA has done well with both.

“Advertisers want the 18-to-49 demographic because they feel that’s the age at which people make the choices that they then follow the rest of their lives,” Pilson says. “One of the reasons why 55-plus is not as attractive [is] a) people are set in their ways, and b) even if you get them to convert, they won’t be around long enough to be of benefit. . .

“The NBA stacks up very well. Better than baseball, for sure, and better than college basketball and football. Probably a little better than the NFL. Not as good as hockey but hockey has a much smaller total audience.”

Says Steinberg: “Generations flip very quickly. My Los Angeles Dodgers of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, are not my son’s Los Angeles Dodgers.

“My 7-year-old son was an enormous Michael Jordan fan, living in Newport Beach. It’s all the television he’s watched. He cried when I told him Michael wouldn’t come back.

“But you know what? There’ll be somebody new and exciting who’ll come along.”

Timing

Pilson says it’s actually good to take both barrels of the shotgun at once--Jordan and lockout--and get all the pain out of the way, rather than taking it piecemeal. “The NBA is a very strong marketing company,” he says. “I think they’ll be fine. I think they’ll take a hit this year. I’m not sure it will be as substantial a hit as most people believe--and then they have nothing but upside.

“I think next year, you’ll begin to see percentage improvements, which they will point to. I think you’ll see the league coming back next season.”

Marketing Savvy

More than any league, Stern’s NBA pioneered the techniques--the use of sponsors to promote players in commercials, the merchandising push--that define modern sports marketing.

It’s one reason NBA officials--such as Gary Bettman, once Stern’s counsel, now NHL commissioner--became hot, and why the league bumped Stern’s salary to $8 million, fearing baseball was about to make a run at him.

“I think they’re going to do a lot of right things,” Burton says. “I met with Rick Welts, who runs NBA Properties, and I believe the game plan he and David are crafting is right on target.

“They’re talking about celebrating the game. It won’t be stated this way but they’re going to celebrate parity, that Jordan’s leaving actually makes more teams competitive. . . .

“I believe they’re going to have new teams with new looks, but with cost certainty, and a likelihood that players are going to stay with teams longer.”

Sneaker Wars

More than any factor, the ‘80s sneaker explosion and the accompanying explosion in ad budgets commercialized Jordan and the NBA, opening heretofore-barred doors to whole industries such as soft drinks, fast food and video games.

This is a red flag because sneaker sales are down, amid worries of a “brown shoe” revolution, and budgets have been slashed.

Even mighty Nike has trimmed its roster of endorsers, although proven movers of product such as Kobe Bryant (Adidas), Penny Hardaway (or his puppet alter ego, Nike), Grant Hill (Fila) and Allen Iverson (Reebok) remain.

“Eighty percent of all advertising in a sport doesn’t come from the league,” Pilson says, “it comes from the sponsors and advertisers.

“So I think if you see a cutback, it’s not going to help the total game. But I think the game can absorb it. But I think if the NBA had its preference, they’d rather that Nike kept its spending at current levels, rather than cut back.”

Jordan’s Departure

You read right.

Jordan’s domination cut two ways. One one hand, he took the league to a new level. On the other, he did it at the expense of his opponents.

Only Hakeem Olajuwon, who led the Rockets to titles in 1994 while Jordan was gone, and 1995 when Jordan came back rusty, could attain that special aura that only attaches itself to champions. When Jordan was around, they were all merely foils.

“There is a theory,” Steinberg says, “that Michael Jordan was a towering oak, so completely overwhelming the basketball scene that no stars were able to grow underneath him.

“With the removal of that tree, there now will be time to focus on a variety of interesting and colorful personalities who could not gain public recognition because of the ubiquitous nature of his presence.”

Labor Peace

This sounds funny, seeing as how the shooting just died down.

However, Burton thinks it produced an agreement that will create a prosperous middle class, encourage young stars to re-sign with their teams--as Bryant, Iverson, Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Antoine Walker and Zydrunas Ilgauskas have--and will be accepted as the basis for future agreements.

“I believe one of the really neat side effects of the new labor peace is, it’s diminished the role of the agent,” Burton says. “And it’s allowed the players not to have to worry about money--’I’m making $100 million, you’re only making $80 million.’ That’s where the game had moved, it had shifted to who’s got the most . . .

“It’s another reason why other leagues are going to be looking at Stern as being brilliant. He’s going to be sainted for what he did with the marketing of the game across the ‘80s and ‘90s, when he turned the image and repositioned the league, from being one about drugs and lawlessness, and put faces on the players.

“And now he’s going to be sainted for his financial acumen and how he changed the way the league perceived itself.”

Meanwhile, ominous rumbles are coming from the NHL, where the union has started a strike fund, and, especially baseball, which is gearing up for another earthshaking dispute in 2001 over its unresolved issues of cost certainty and parity.

Burton says baseball “is actually headed toward a real meltdown.”

Says Pilson: “I think they’re headed for their own brand of Armageddon when their next labor contract comes up. My guess it’ll be the same thing happening in baseball as happened in the NBA.”

In Conclusion . . .

Things could be worse, anyway.

The lockout could still be on. David Falk could be holding a news conference to announce the formation of his new league. . . .