VIDEO: Bryant Gumbel Compares David Stern To A Plantation Owner

On Monday one columnist wrote of David Stern and the NBA lockout and said, “[His] playbook is small, predictable and impossible to stop.” But ya know, maybe it’s time for an audible. While Stern bulldozes ahead with his “three yards and a cloud of smug” strategy, some in the media are beginning to take exception to the way’s he approaching all this.

Like Bryant Gumbel.

On the latest episode of HBO’s Real Sports, Gumbel upped the ante in the war of rhetoric:

If the NBA lockout is going to be resolved anytime soon, it seems likely to be done in spite of David Stern, not because of him. I say that because the NBA’s infamously ego-centric commissioner seems more hell-bent lately on demeaning the players than resolving his league’s labor impasse.

And that’s before the slavery analogy. Video and a full transcript is after the jump.

Stern’s faced plenty of criticism before, but this isn’t some lowly sports blogger calling foul. Say what you want about Bryant Gumbel, but he’s not given to reckless hyperbole, and Real Sports is one of the most respected brands in sports journalism. As Gumbel continues:

How else to explain Stern’s rants in recent days? To any and everyone who would listen, he has alternately knocked union leader Billy Hunter, said the players were getting inaccurate information, and started sounding Chicken Little claims about what games might be lost, if players didn’t soon see things his way.

Stern’s version of what’s been going on behind closed doors has of course been disputed. But his efforts were typical of a commissioner that has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men, as if they were his boys.

It’s part of Stern’s M.O. Like his past self-serving edicts on dress code or the questioning of officials, his moves were intended to do little more than show how he’s the one keeping the hired hands in place. Some will of course cringe at that characterization, but Stern’s disdain for the players is as palpable and pathetic as his motives are transparent. Yes the NBA’s business model is broken. But to fix it, maybe the league’s commissioner should concern himself most with a solution, and stop being part of the problem.

COT DAMN.

Yeah, so... Remember when David Stern told a room of NBA stars that he knows where “the bodies are buried” because he’d buried some of them himself? Well, the longer this lockout drags on and the longer Stern insists on playing the bully, doesn’t it feel like he might be digging his own grave?