Commissioner
National Basketball Association
David Stern leads a league that is a model for professional sports in league operations, public service, global marketing and digital technology.

Since Mr. Stern’s unanimous election as the NBA’s fourth Commissioner on February 1, 1984, the league has added seven franchises; enjoyed a fifteen-fold increase in revenues; expanded its national television exposure dramatically; and launched the Women’s National Basketball Association and the NBA Development League. Interest generated by the league’s growing international initiatives has led to the televising of NBA games in 215 countries in 41 languages. NBA TV, which launched in 1999, was the first 24-hour television network created and operated by a professional sports league. The leagues’ Web sites, NBA.com, WNBA.com and NBADLEAGUE.com averaged 26 million page views per day during the 2008-09 season, with more than half of them coming from outside the U.S.

After beginning his association with the league in 1966 as its outside counsel, Mr. Stern joined the NBA in 1978 as General Counsel and became the league’s Executive Vice President in 1980. During those years, he had a hand in virtually every matter that would shape the league, including the landmark 1976 settlement between the NBA and its players leading to free agency; the Collective Bargaining Agreement that introduced the salary cap and revenue sharing; professional sports’ first anti-drug agreement; and the creation of NBA Entertainment, a marketing, television and multimedia production company that has been telling the NBA story in award-winning fashion for two decades.

An intense commitment to social responsibility both in the United States and around the world has marked Mr. Stern’s tenure as Commissioner. In 2005, the league launched NBA Cares, a program through which the NBA, its players and teams have donated more than $115 million to charity, provided more than one million hours of hands-on service to communities around the world, and created more than 440 places where kids and families can live, learn or play. NBA CARES supports a host of community outreach initiatives, including Read to Achieve, the Jr. NBA/Jr. WNBA, Basketball without Borders and a myriad of internationally recognized youth-serving programs that focus on education, youth and family development, and health-related causes. The NBA and its players have also supported, among other causes, volunteerism, child abuse prevention, drug abuse prevention, hunger relief, HIV/AIDS awareness and the Special Olympics.

Mr. Stern is the chair emeritus of the Trustees of Columbia University and serves or has served on the boards of Beth Israel Medical Center, the Rutgers University Foundation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, the Paley Center for Media, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A native of New York City, Mr. Stern is a graduate of Rutgers University and Columbia Law School. He is married to Dianne Bock Stern, and they are the parents of two adult sons.

10/09