David Stern does not want to bore you

"We've had a great season. I'm not going to bore you with the metrics."

That's David Stern, at his annual state of the NBA news conference at the Finals, declining to go into details as to how well his league is doing.

Of course, year after year, Stern takes great delight in boring the media with the metrics, so to speak, even when the league is doing terribly. He'll spin terrible numbers under dubious metrics to make it seem like everything's OK even in the face of a terrible economy and a second-straight Lakers/Nets NBA Finals pairing. He'll do whatever it takes to keep that bemused smile on his face.

David Stern lives to bore us with the metrics. But now, with things going as well as they ever have (24 years ago, a Lakers/Celtics Game 1 ended the week ranked 26th amongst all broadcast and cable programming; these days the league is riding a wave of popularity unseen since the days of Michael Jordan, with some metrics, pardon the phrase, showing us that the league is even doing better than that), Stern wants to spare us the details before he locks the players out and potentially puts the 2011-12 season on hold in order to come up with yet another set of rules to help save the owners from themselves.

It's not the metrics that bore us, David. It's your utter lack of shame.

Nate Thurmond Wes Unseld Bill Walton Jerry West Lenny Wilkens