A good news, bad news summer for NBA Commissioner

Isiah Thomas is back. Great. Maybe next David Stern can call the Pistons and Pacers back from summer recess to rumble in the Palace this week.

It's been some couple months for the commissioner. Positive actual news for the league has been set against image hits, meaningful developments overrun by perception issues. And to think it's only August.

This has not been a very good summer for Stern, even though it has been. There have been tangible accomplishments, victories especially noteworthy in difficult times, but the league, its teams and its players are still deep in a PR battle with the public.

Of course it's an image thing. It's always an image thing with the NBA. A baseball umpire chokes on a call that costs a pitcher a perfect game, an NFL official botches a coin toss, and they go down as horrendous rulings. An NBA stripe trips over a moment: Fix!

So perception matters, and it matters a lot to a commissioner who long ago made PR a priority. Woe be the staffer deemed to have mishandled a situation; the paint will be peeling in whatever room Stern has trapped them in.

Stern is aware his league is fighting image battles others aren't. He doesn't agree with all the claims, which is why this matters more than a typical summer passing the time.

LeBron James didn't have the first clue how to handle his departure from Cleveland with professionalism and class. Fine, but the actual news of the day was that he switched teams and what the decision meant for rosters in Miami and Cleveland. Except that it became a very big deal, so head-shakingly bad that Stern himself condemned the method.

The Knicks re-hired Isiah Thomas. OK. He's a consultant, although it's naïve to believe his input will have the limited weight the title implies. That too became a very big deal.

Even Darko Milicic got sucked into this. He got a $20-million free-agent deal from the Timberwolves, making it tougher for Stern to insist that the Collective Bargaining Agreement is a broken business model that must be scrapped. Twenty-mil for Darko, $32 million for Drew Gooden, $34 million for Amir Johnson -- if that many owners, some in small-market settings, are able to pony up that much money, it looks bad for the commish to cry poverty on behalf of his teams. Plus, the Golden State Warriors were sold for more money than any NBA team ever.

How bad of shape, the union is obviously wondering, can teams really be in if smart business people will pay a reported $450 million for a team that never makes the playoffs?

A good question. Stern will have difficulty, after this summer, sitting across the table in negotiations on a new CBA and say with a straight face that his owners are being financially crushed.

But here's what he can say:

The Warriors were just sold for more money than any NBA team has ever been sold for!

Darko Milicic just got $20 million!

These are developments that hurt his stance in CBA talks, but are undeniably good news in every area except perception. In bad economic times, journeymen and fringe players are commanding major contracts while a bad team went on the market and was sold at a record price. Clearly, that speaks to the strength of the league, and if the league weren't in negotiations, Stern would be carrying those facts around on a sign.

Mikhail Prokhorov officially closed on the Nets sale, too. That's a huge moment for the NBA, a foothold into Russia and potentially untapped international markets, while giving the team here a needed infusion of energy and cash. Stern didn't get the dream follow up of Larry Ellison buying the Warriors -- the Ellison perspective: take Paul Allen and Prokhorov, and their combined wealth still falls short of Ellison, according to Fortune -- but that there was strong interest in Golden State is a very positive read on the value of the Bay Area market.

Stern has had those kinds of tangibly positive moments amid the image problems. He's about two months removed from the cash-register Finals, Lakers-Celtics, a consistent ratings winner for ABC that in the end delivered the highest viewership for an NBA game in 12 years. He's about 2 ½ months from a regular season that will have rookie No. 1 picks on each coast, Blake Griffin with the Clippers and John Wall with the Wizards.

Just because things look wrong in the summer of The Decision doesn't mean these are actually desperate times.

Scott Howard-Cooper has covered the NBA since 1988. You can e-mail him here and follow him on twitter. The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Turner Broadcasting.