Has David Stern Lost Control of the NBA's Integrity?

David Stern has a lot of roles within the organization that is the NBA, and one of the most important ones is to protect the integrity of the league. If we can't believe that the product we're seeing on the basketball courts around the country is legitimate, then why should we watch? 

If Stern loses control of the NBA's integrity, then he is no longer doing his job and needs to step down. The Association is bigger than any one man, including the one who sits at the forefront of it.

Lately, everything happening around the league seems to be giving rise to more and more conspiracy theorists.

The New Orleans Hornets—who, I remind you, had a 13.7 percent chance of winning the draft lottery—jumped ahead of the Charlotte Bobcats, Washington Wizards and Cleveland Cavaliers en route to the No. 1 pick and the rights to Anthony Davis? Stern must have compromised the lottery process to help the league-owned team beat the odds.

The Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder, two of the most marketable teams in the league, are facing off in the 2012 NBA Finals? Stern must have fixed it so that the finals were preordained.

Miami won a game and was aided by a missed call? Stern clearly told that referee he'd be fired if the Heat didn't win.

Doesn't that sound kind of ridiculous? If Stern had been fixing the league over the last decade—give or take a few years—don't you think that we'd have a little more definitive proof than a supposedly frozen envelope and a few coincidences?

I absolutely despise conspiracy theories, mostly because they stem from misinterpretations of numbers and human error.

The Hornets' odds to win the lottery were in no way outlandish. They just got lucky. Sometimes the numbers just work out that way and you have to deal with it.

As for the fixing of the league to produce a dream finals matchup—isn't it funny that it just happened to be the two best teams?

Then there are the referees.

I'm lucky I haven't pulled a Gus Frerotte and hospitalized myself given the number of times I've wanted to bang my head against the wall as bitter fan after bitter fan inanely blames a loss on the zebras.

I'd be fine with that if, you know, the Zebras were an actual team and they were playing in the finals.

What people conveniently forget is that the men in stripes are humans. They make errors just like the rest of us. Sometimes those errors are more egregious than we'd like.

So, let's backtrack to the original question of whether Stern has lost control of the integrity of the NBA.

To some NBA fans, he absolutely has. Yet I doubt you'll find many people who consistently hold that viewpoint over a lengthy duration of time. It's only when their team is supposedly being tampered with that they complain.

OKC fans didn't complain during the Western Conference finals. San Antonio Spurs fans did.

Now, Miami fans aren't complaining during the NBA Finals. OKC fans are.

You know what those two latter teams have in common? They're both losing or have already lost. It's only natural to try to find a way to project anger, and Stern has been a convenient punching bag because of the seeming ineptness of some referees.

Stern has made some bad moves in his career, but he's also done wonders in making the NBA a global league and one of the most popular associations in all of sports.

When you really stop to think about it, he hasn't lost the integrity of the league at all.