After the league spent 35 years using the same classic leather ball, NBA Commissioner David Stern decided over the summer to replace it with a synthetically engineered model designed by Spalding that supposedly grips better, bounces truer and lasts longer. Several players immediately sounded off, including Shaquille O’Neal, who suggested that the ball’s designer should have his college degree revoked. Stern insisted that players would adjust and, according to Cuban, most have. “What the players haven’t gotten used to are the cuts on their hands,” he wrote. “That said, I don’t think the league can change the ball at this point. Guys have worked too hard to get used to it.”
Cuban has spent most of his NBA tenure butting heads with Stern–he’s about the only one who dares–so perhaps he’s just used to his boss’s refusing to budge. But in a surprise development last week, Stern admitted that he’d blown it. “I won’t make a spirited defense with respect to the ball,” he told The New York Times. “In hindsight, we could’ve done a better job.” (Stern declined NEWSWEEK’s request for comment.) Spalding, for its part, is conceding nothing. “All I can say is that … we are working with the NBA on a daily basis to ensure that the product on the floor is the best possible,” says Dan Touhey, Spalding’s vice president of marketing. As for what’s causing the cuts, one theory is that the new ball, when dry, is too grippy and it yanks at the players’ skin. Touhey, however, declined to comment on the issue.
Stern rarely admits he’s wrong, so what swayed him? Perhaps he doesn’t want the players’ blood on his hands. If so, he needs to move fast, because it’s already on theirs. But players have also griped about the ball, once it’s slick with sweat, slipping out of their fingers. Cuban actually predicted this would happen. In an Oct. 27 posting on his blogmaverick.com, he disclosed an analysis of the new ball that he commissioned from the University of Texas at Arlington’s physics department. Among its conclusions: the new ball is easier to grip than the old one when it’s fresh out of the box, but “with a few drops of added moisture on the surface … the new synthetic balls have a coefficient of friction which is at least 30 percent smaller than similarly moistened leather balls.” In other words, sweat makes the new ball more slippery than the old one.
That’s a big problem, but Stern promises a solution. “Everything is on the table,” he told the Times. “The right thing is to listen to our players.” And what are the players saying? Phoenix Suns guard Raja Bell put it best when a reporter asked him about the new ball. “It sucks,” he said.
