As a lawyer with no previous basketball experience, Podoloff's great organizational and administrative skills were later regarded as the key factor that kept the league alive in its often stormy formative years.

During his period in office, he had helped increase fan interest during the NBA's formative years and improved the overall welfare of the sport of basketball through his foresight, wisdom, and leadership.

Succeeding first president Maurice Podoloff, the likable, approachable J. Walter Kennedy became an iron-handed executive and let everyone know precisely where he stood on issues.

Kennedy was also the commissioner who upheld the first protest ever in the NBA, which was the one filed by the Chicago Bulls for "the Phantom Buzzer Game" against the Atlanta Hawks in 1969.

The new commissioner came into the NBA when the league was struggling with only nine teams, no television contract, sagging attendance and competition from the increasingly popular American Basketball Association.

When Kennedy retired in 1975 as commissioner, the league had increased to 18 teams, landed a lucrative television contract and improved its financial standing considerably, experienced a 200 percent boost in income and attendance figures tripled during his tenure.

It brought the American Basketball Association into the NBA, negotiated television-broadcast agreements with CBS, and saw game attendance increase significantly.

[2] Jordan and the two other premier basketball players of the 1980s, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, took the game to new heights of popularity and profit.

Stern has been credited for developing and broadening the NBA's audience, by setting up training camps, playing exhibition games around the world, and recruiting more international players.

[3] The NBA now has eleven offices in cities outside the United States, is televised in 215 countries around the world in 43 languages, and operates the WNBA and the National Basketball Development League under Stern's watch.

Six years into Silver's tenure, he announced that the league would suspend operations as a result of Rudy Gobert testing positive for COVID-19.