ESPN may have enjoyed the NBA’s recent by-plots with the Los Angeles Lakers and Kevin Durant during the Finals, but Dan Patrick knows David Stern wouldn’t have been okay with it.
A league’s championship series is supposed to be its crown jewel, with all other headlines and stories standing down until after a champion is crowned. In 2007, Alex Rodriguez infamously sparked outrage by announcing plans to opt out of his contract with the New York Yankees during the eighth inning of Game 4.
During this year’s NBA Finals, the series was overshadowed at times by news of the Buss family selling the Lakers to Mark Walter for $10 billion and Durant being traded to the Houston Rockets. And Patrick wonders whether Commissioner Adam Silver was okay with it.
“Somebody broke the story on the Lakers. Shams broke the story. Maybe that wasn’t supposed to come out until this week,” Patrick said on his Monday morning radio show. “The Durant trade, we knew it was going to happen, maybe somebody broke that ahead of schedule…Yeah, I was surprised. And if we have the commissioner on again anytime soon, I’ll ask him about that because he was there with David Stern. He worked with David Stern. And I know for a fact that David Stern did not want any news during the NBA Finals other than the NBA Finals. He told me that point blank one time.”
Patrick claimed Silver’s predecessor, the late David Stern, told him to stick to the Finals during his days anchoring SportsCenter for ESPN. And the lone time Patrick relayed breaking news of an NBA head coaching change during the league’s championship series, he quickly had Stern in his ear, reminding him to stick to the Finals. A league commissioner telling a SportsCenter anchor what news to cover is a questionable chain of command, but with the Lakers being sold and Durant getting traded, these were stories ESPN couldn’t pass up in 2025.
“I’m sure the mothership loved this,” Patrick admitted of ESPN. “Because they had something other than the Thunder and the Pacers to talk about. You had other stories that more people would be interested in. The Kevin Durant story, that felt like it was front burner for the last 10 days on ESPN. Like they were almost praying, begging, wishful reporting to get him to the Knicks.”
No basketball fan heard the news of the Lakers being sold or Durant getting traded and said, ‘Welp, I got my NBA fix for the day, no need to watch the Finals.’ But those NBA headlines gave ESPN reason to push the Finals aside, which might not be the best mode of promotion for the league’s championship series.
It would be interesting to know whether Silver had an issue with these stories breaking during the Finals. The bigger question, however, is whether these stories would have broken if the Finals featured larger market matchups, such as the Knicks and Lakers.