Lance Stephenson Goes Coast-to-Coast on the Knicks, Goes Right Through Raymond Felton 
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Watch Klay Thompson Get Buckets in High School Unacceptable Blackness: The NBA Lockout As A White-Collar Race War
Michael Jordan
For decades, professional athletes have been wired to do as they are told. It is a mindset born early: from the time Little Leaguers are taught to respect and obey the coach, from when students are taught to respect and obey the teacher, from when babies learn to respect and obey the parent.
Watch a football game and count how many times the quarterback looks over to the sidelines for direction. Watch a track meet and count how many runners, jumpers and throwers make a beeline to their coaches in times of success or failure. Athletes operate best under the guidance of authority.
At the highest level of basketball, NBA players were always commodities to be bought and sold at the whim of the front office. Where they were drafted, when and how they were traded, all beyond their control. Even in free agency, the sense was that players only entertained offers from teams that approached them first, rather than taking a proactive approach to determine their destinies.
Just by looking at the numbers, nine times out of 10, these transactions involve a White man controlling a Black man’s professional fate for the ultimate financial benefit of another White man. And to an extent, it will always be that way.
But then last summer LeBron and his superstar Miami mates changed the game. They got together and decided how things were going to go. They called the shots. And maybe, on a less-visible level, something like that had happened before. But never like that.
It was only natural, though, considering that this is the generation of NBA players who grew up idolizing Michael Jordan. These are the players who watched MJ become bigger than the league while becoming rich enough to eventually own an NBA team. These are the players who now earn larger salaries for mediocre production than Jordan earned in salary during most of his prime years.
These are also the players who entered the NBA with an unprecedented amount of power. It just took a national-TV special and an All-Star summit organized by Wade (as he alluded to months beforehand in Dime #54) for everybody to realize it.
That’s when the NBA’s power dynamic — that aforementioned Black and White thing — took a turn that didn’t agree with the establishment. According to a New York Times report from an NBA owners meeting held days after the LeBron signing, “there was some sentiment for revisiting the rules governing player-to-player tampering.”
NBA commissioner David Stern was quoted in that article. “What we told the owners was that the three players are totally, as our system has evolved, within their rights to talk to each other,” he said.
Stern was, of course, talking about that same “evolved” system that his league’s owners are now willing to lose a season’s worth of revenue to overhaul.
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