The WNBA – an infighting, cultural battlefield that occasionally doubles as a basketball league – has reached its November 19, 2004, inflection point, and desperately needs its David Stern.
On that November night 22 years ago, Detroit Pistons center Ben Wallace went up for a layup, where he was met and clobbered by Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest. What started as a shoving match between the two players quickly turned into a brawl between the two teams.
Had it ended there, it would have been bad enough. By 2004, Michael, Magic and Bird had officially hung up their sneakers, and the NBA was failing during its critical crossroads. No player walked into the void left by those superstars. Instead, in their wake, the league veered far in the other direction, taking the finesse out of the game and turning on-court play into a street fight, with officials unable or unwilling to get their arms round the physicality.
It led to a gaping disconnect between players and fans. One NBA official told the Washington Post at the time that even an NBA focus group ranked the league’s athletes as the least popular among all professional sports.
All of which served as the backdrop to what happened next in Auburn Hills, Michigan. As the fight between the Pacers and Pistons finally simmered down, a fan threw a drink at Artest as he lay sprawled across the scorer’s table. Artest climbed into the stands, intent on finding the perpetrator. His teammate, Stephen Jackson, followed him, and within minutes players and fans were throwing haymakers at one another, creating terrifying chaos and images that would haunt the league.
