Why do we care so much about the NBA? Sure, the feats of athleticism on the court are unrivaled. But maybe it’s also because off the court, the league intersects with societal and cultural issues arguably more than any other sporting enterprise.

Think about some of the most significant NBA off-court stories of the past 25 years and the big-picture themes involved in them:

  • Racial politics and injustice
  • Sexual misconduct
  • Guns and workplace violence
  • Gambling’s pervasiveness
  • The pandemic (Who can forget Rudy Gobert’s defiant, recorder-rubbing news conference?)
  • Social media shenanigans
  • And outright tragedy

No matter the hot-button topic, you can usually find an adjacent NBA angle. Of course, the league creates an incredible amount of tantalizing basketball-related news as well, including free-agency spectacles and labor disputes. It’s actually one of America’s great debate-generating institutions.

This list, voted on by a committee of eight writers and editors, also serves as a reminder that while NBA superstars can often feel larger than life, their stories are also our stories. – Brian Bennett

1. Kobe Bryant killed in helicopter crash

The defining moment of the last 25 years of NBA basketball was the saddest, an unthinkable tragedy, an unimaginable loss, an unbearable amount of grief.

On Jan. 26, 2020 — one day after LeBron James passed him on the NBA’s all-time scoring list — Kobe Bryant boarded a helicopter with his daughter Gianna and six other players and parents from Gianna Bryant’s youth basketball team. All eight passengers and the pilot died when the helicopter crashed in the Calabasas, Calif. hills.

Pain radiated throughout the NBA, with the game’s greatest from Jerry West to Michael Jordan tearfully mourning with Lakers and basketball fans across the world. Kobe and Gianna Bryant have been forever immortalized in tributes ranging from a statue outside the Los Angeles arena Bryant called home to murals on six of the world’s seven continents. — Dan Woike

Kobe Bryant, 1978-2020: Coverage from The Athletic

2. Malice at the Palace, Stern institutes dress code

When the dust settled on one of the darkest nights in NBA history — the brawl between the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers that spilled into the stands and pitted players against fans on Nov. 19, 2004 — David Stern cracked down hard.

Ron Artest was suspended for the rest of the season, which totaled 86 games, including the playoffs. Stephen Jackson got 30 games, and Jermaine O’Neal’s original 25-game suspension was reduced to 15. Ben Wallace also was suspended six games for Detroit.

Stern also introduced a dress code for players, making it mandatory that they wear “business attire” to games. The move sparked controversy, with critics believing it targeted young Black males and had racial undertones. The dress code was eventually relaxed years later, but aftershocks of that night still linger to this day. — Jon Krawczynski 

3. “The Decision”

The NBA had never been brought to heel by a single player’s individual choice about where he’d play basketball.

But LeBron James, already a two-time league MVP at age 25, made it clear he was going to control every aspect of his impending free agency in 2010 — and any team that wanted to make a pitch would do it on his terms.

So a fifth of the league’s teams made the pilgrimage to Cleveland the first week of July to plead their case, after which James would tell the world where he was going during a 75-minute special on ESPN.

“The Decision,” as the special came to be known, eventually delivered on its stated task. A clearly uncomfortable James, at a Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich, Conn., after almost an hour, finally told the world he would “take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.”

But the bigger impact — the dawn of the player empowerment era — was overshadowed by the near-unanimous criticism of how James’ camp devised and pulled off the TV show. It was followed with a meltdown by many in Cleveland, including the Cavaliers’ owner, Dan Gilbert, who pilloried the once-favorite son of the city in a press release — written in the never-to-be-forgotten Comic Sans font. — David Aldridge 

4. The Bubble

The NBA “Bubble” at Disney World for a period of more than three months in the pandemic summer and early fall of 2020, was a success by almost any measure.

There were zero cases of COVID among the 700 NBA players and team staff who were there. No playoff games were canceled and a champion was crowned, which meant there was no violation of the league’s multibillion-dollar TV contract. Some, according to Daryl Morey, suggest the Lakers’ championship deserves an asterisk.

Tell that to LeBron James. The season almost stopped again, and for good, when the Bucks walked out before a playoff game against the Orlando Magic in protest of the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wis. (The Bucks and Magic would play the game three days later.)

James needed to sleep on it the night after the protest to decide if he was leaving The Bubble. If he left, the whole league would’ve followed him. A phone call from former President Barack Obama swayed James to stay. — Joe Vardon 

5. Kobe Bryant’s sexual assault trial

Right as Kobe Bryant’s on-court power was reaching its zenith, accusations of a sexual assault left the Lakers star potentially facing significant jail time.

On June 30, 2003, Bryant was accused of a non-consensual sexual encounter with a 19-year-old hotel employee. He was arrested, and stood trial for one count of felony sexual assault. He maintained the encounter was consensual. His defense team’s tactics toward the accuser, including saying her name in open court, drew strong criticism.

For more than a year, Bryant juggled his job playing in the NBA with the court case. In 2004, charges were dropped when the accuser no longer wanted to testify.

“Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did,” he said as part of a statement issued the day charges were dropped. “After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.”

Bryant and the accuser settled a civil case for an undisclosed amount in 2005. — Woike

6. Utah-OKC game postponed because of COVID

“Should I go and get tested?”

On March 11, 2020, that was the question I got from an Uber driver, who took me and my colleagues from lunch in Oklahoma City after a shootaround to our respective hotels.

That lunch was fun and festive. A few hours later, the world changed.

It was eerie being in the arena where the NBA world shut down the night Utah Jazz stars Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell tested positive for COVID.

The silence amid panic was unsettling. As reporters, we had to balance our jobs with fear for our health and worried calls from family members. We ended that night in the Jazz locker room — not as reporters with NBA players and staff, but as a group of human beings.

It’s a night nobody will forget: the game being stopped at tip-off, the halftime show being performed before the game to keep a confused crowd engaged, the murmur through the arena as the news hit social media, the public address announcer imploring calm as everyone was ordered to leave the building.

You can never forget the unforgettable. — Tony Jones

7. Tim Donaghy betting scandal

It was among the NBA’s nightmare scenarios: In 2006, the FBI opened an investigation into allegations that one of the league’s referees was betting on games he officiated in concert with organized crime figures. A year later, Tim Donaghy, who’d been an official for 13 years, was identified as the referee in question.

Donaghy admitted that he’d bet on NBA games during a four-year period. Usually, he bet on games that he worked. But he also was passing along intelligence about other games to gamblers, providing inside information on the officiating crews working those games and alleged patterns of calls by those referees that could help predict how they’d call their games.

Donaghy ultimately pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to engage in wagering over state lines. He then accused other referees of fixing games at the league’s behest, but federal officials didn’t find evidence to investigate further.

An independent investigation in 2008 by attorney Larry Pedowitz found that no other referees had fixed games, though they had broken then-existing league rules by betting on golf matches they played in and by visiting and playing cards at casinos. Donaghy was sentenced to 15 months in prison. — Aldridge

8. Donald Sterling forced to sell Clippers

The Clippers were one game into the 2014 playoffs, looking like the best team the organization had ever assembled with NBA champion Doc Rivers on the sidelines, when TMZ published an audio recording of owner Donald Sterling’s racist comments, including him telling his alleged mistress V. Stiviano that he didn’t want her posting photos with Magic Johnson or bringing Black people to games as her guest.

The story became a national scandal and nearly resulted in a player-led boycott. The NBA and commissioner Adam Silver, who took over for David Stern in February 2014, acted swiftly, banning Sterling for life four days later. By the summer, the team had been sold to Steve Ballmer. — Woike

9. SuperSonics move to OKC, become Thunder

For four decades, the Seattle SuperSonics had been one of the NBA’s more colorful franchises. Its alumni included Spencer Haywood, Slick Watts, Lenny Wilkens, Dennis Johnson, Gus Williams, Jack Sikma, Tom Chambers, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp.

But the Sonics wanted a new arena in the early 2000s. Despite intensive lobbying by David Stern, the Washington state legislature declined to provide funding for one.

That proved fatal. In 2006, Starbucks magnate Howard Schultz sold the Sonics to a group led by Oklahoma City businessman Clay Bennett. After pedestrian attempts to revive an arena deal in Seattle failed, Bennett did what Seattle fans feared was the plan all along, announcing he would move the team to Oklahoma City.

Local fan groups and civic officials tried desperately to litigate a way to keep the team in town, but after weeks of back and forth, Seattle settled with Bennett for $75 million, allowing the team to relocate to OKC for the 2008-09 season. — Aldridge

10. Chris Paul trade vetoed for “basketball reasons”

The Twitter meme for Chris Paul’s time on the Lakers has him in a Hornets jersey at 7:05, a Lakers jersey from 7:06 to 9:22 and then back in the Hornets jersey at 9:23.

It’s a hilarious look into the short amount of time we thought Prime CP3, aka the Point God, was teaming up with Kobe Bryant on the Lake Show in December of 2011. He was briefly traded to the Lakers following the end of the 2011 lockout and then David Stern vetoed the trade. The NBA actually owned the Hornets at that time, as they purchased the franchise from George Shinn in 2010. They wanted it out of his incapable hands as they searched for someone new to take the franchise.

Technically, any owner has the power to veto a trade by their team, and the NBA’s message was Stern did it for “basketball reasons.” We also know Stern was getting pressured by certain owners to not allow the trade to happen. Instead of ending up with Lamar Odom, Luis Scola, Kevin Martin, Goran Dragic and a 2012 first (via the Knicks), the Hornets ended up with Chris Kaman, Al-Farouq Aminu, Eric Gordon and a 2012 first (via the TImberwolves) when they traded him to the Clippers on Dec. 11, 2011.

“Basketball reasons,” you say? Maybe? It wasn’t a transaction because the league was trying to balance harmony with team owners while still ratifying the new CBA. Transactions happen in a front office.

This feels like it happened in a boardroom. – Zach Harper

11. The 2011 lockout

A revisionist-history thought: Was the 2011 lockout, as dumb as it all seemed at the time, actually a good thing long-term for the league, a necessary evil for the two-decade run of labor peace that followed?  (The last CBA doesn’t expire until 2030).

The agreement gave the players 51 percent of basketball-related income, a figure which has essentially stuck through the last two agreements, as has much of the luxury tax and revenue sharing language.

Unfortunately, it cost us 16 games from the start of the 2011-12 schedule and a lot of quality from the rest of it, as the league shoehorned 66 games (including back-to-back-to-backs!) into a schedule that started on Christmas — after the mayhem of packing an entire offseason into roughly four days before training camps started. — Hollinger

Gilbert Arenas made light of his bringing guns into the Wizards locker room. The NBA suspended him after the game. (Photo: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images)

12. Arenas brings guns to the locker room

“Pick 1.”

That was the note, written by Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas and left for his teammate Javaris Crittenton that sparked one of the league’s most notorious sagas in December 2009. Their dispute over Arenas’ unpaid gambling debt led to Arenas bringing four guns into an NBA locker room, daring Crittenton to follow through with the threats he’d lobbed.

For a league that was trying to keep its image clean, it was a PR disaster. For the men at the center of it all, it was life-changing.

David Stern suspended both players for the final four months of the season, with Arenas traded to Orlando in the following summer and Crittenton unofficially exiled from the league. Arenas’ once-electric NBA career never recovered.

Less than two years after the incident, Crittenton attempted to gun down a man who had robbed him in Atlanta and accidentally killed a 22-year-old mother of four. He spent a decade in prison for involuntary manslaughter, and was released in April of 2023. — Sam Amick

13. The 2016 salary cap spike

Life rarely gives you chances to spend a quarter-billion dollars of someone else’s money in less than an hour. Thanks to the 2016 cap spike, I got that opportunity.

Thanks to a new deal, a massive increase in TV revenue resulted in a huge one-year jump in the salary cap in the summer of 2016. It was the result of the league and player’s association falling to agree on the concept of “cap smoothing”: spreading the jump over multiple years instead of one. Instead, nearly every team had cap room, and the market had far more money than talent.

While the Warriors made out — the spike is the biggest reason they could sign Kevin Durant — most teams left that free agency bender with brutal salary cap hangovers.

My Grizzlies, where I was vice president of basketball operations from 2012 to 2019, gave max deals to Mike Conley (OK!) and Chandler Parsons (Yikes!), while bidding wars erupted around the league for far lesser talents. Timofey Mozgov, Evan Turner, Allen Crabbe, Ian Mahinmi, Kent Bazemore, Solomon Hill, Miles Plumlee, Tyler Johnson, Bismack Biyombo, Ryan Anderson and the end-of-the-line versions of Luol Deng and Joakim Noah all signed deals worth $50 million or more … and this was in 2016! — Hollinger

14. Rozier, Billups arrested; Jontay Porter banned

Nothing encapsulated the moral and business morass the NBA and other leagues now find themselves in with sports gambling more than the indictments filed by the Department of Justice one October morning this fall.

Federal prosecutors charged Heat guard Terry Rozier with taking himself out early of a game so that he could help a syndicate of sports bettors win on his prop bets.

It came less than two years after Jontay Porter, who was banned by the NBA in April 2024, admitted to doing something similar with some of the same people indicted alongside Rozier.

To boot, Chauncey Billups was charged in a rigged poker game ring that intersected with an alleged illegal sports gambling scheme. It was headline news across the world, and it put the NBA in an uncomfortable Venn diagram with sports gambling and the mafia, surely a grouping they want to avoid.

The federal indictments will likely force a reckoning about the NBA’s affiliation with sports gambling companies and how it impacts the sport. The results of the investigation and of the criminal case remain to be seen, but it has already rocked the league. — Mike Vorkunov

15. Kawhi Leonard/LA Clippers Aspiration scandal

Everyone likes a scandal, and this one has everything; a taciturn and mysterious star; one of the world’s richest men; a company caught in the middle of a bankruptcy proceeding; and a founder who pled guilty to fraud.

Right at the heart of that: Did they all conspire to break one of the NBA’s most sanctified rules?

The Kawhi Leonard-Clippers-Aspiration-Steve Ballmer affair has been tabloid fodder since the moment it was first reported by the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, and every new turn and morsel of information has been quickly digested and debated.

It is almost perfect for this era, a true crime podcast with a multi-billion dollar company in the middle and very high NBA (but small real-life) stakes. It’s the sports world’s favorite mystery. – Vorkunov

16. Hurricane Katrina sends Hornets to OKC

The NBA had to scramble. The 2005-06 season was set to tip off in roughly two months, and the New Orleans Hornets had nowhere to play.

The area surrounding the Hornets’ home arena was completely flooded, as Hurricane Katrina devastated the city on August 29, 2005, killing nearly 1,400 people and destroying or damaging more than 200,000 800,00 homes.

David Stern and Oklahoma City mayor Mick Cornett quickly sprang into action to temporarily relocate the Hornets to OKC, since the city had an arena capable of hosting NBA games despite not having a major professional team. Local fans embraced the newly minted New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets, and a young point guard named Chris Paul even won 2006 Rookie of the Year.

A couple years later (see our No. 9), OKC had a team of its own. — Mirin Fader

17. Colangelo burner account scandal

This is the kind of social media-driven saga that feels like it could only happen in the NBA.

Philadelphia 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo resigned in June 2018 after admitting that his wife started several “burner” accounts on the app formerly known as Twitter to defend her husband. Some of the accounts also criticized active and former 76ers players and former GM Sam Hinkie, leading many to believe that Colangelo was doing at least some of the tweeting himself.

The salacious story came to light thanks to reporting from The Ringer, which connected the dots from the accounts back to the Colangelos. It was an ignominious end for Colangelo, who took over the Sixers front office after Hinkie resigned.

At that time, Colangelo was brought in by his father, Jerry, to help “rescue” the franchise from Hinkie’s oft-criticized strategy of tanking for draft picks to rebuild, dubbed “The Process.” In the end, the supposed savior had to resign in disgrace and has never worked in the NBA again. — Jon Krawczynski

18. Kings remain in Sacramento

500 David J. Stern Walk: The address in Sacramento is the culmination of passion from an underdog city and fans.

The Maloof family purchased the Kings in 1998 and went on a run of success that hadn’t been seen there before, culminating with reaching the 2002 Western Conference finals.

But by 2010, finances were strained and the Maloofs began looking at other cities. Anaheim was an option, but the Maloofs would eventually focus on an ownership group in Seattle. Mayor Kevin Johnson and Kings fans fought to keep the team.

With Commissioner Stern as an ally, a local ownership group led by Vivek Ranadive, then a minority owner with Golden State, emerged to keep the Kings in Sacramento after it appeared their departure was inevitable. The street sign for 500 David J. Stern Walk is a reminder that he and the city never gave up on keeping the team where it was.  — Jason Jones

19. Jerry Colangelo named director of USA Basketball

USA men’s Basketball had dominated internationally since professional NBA players were allowed to participate in the 1992 Olympics.

Then, in 2004, Team USA sent a bunch of big names to Athens — only to get humbled with the bronze medal, sending a shock through the program. In most cases, a bronze would be a great honor. For Team USA, it was nothing but shame.

Jerry Colangelo took over operations after that, and decided to build a team the right way. He got the best commitments for 2008, led by Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony and many more stars. They won their five group play games by a total of 161 points.

They smacked Australia and then Argentina (the 2004 gold medalists) to find themselves in a showdown against Spain. And while the gold medal game wasn’t a blowout, it reminded the world which country runs men’s basketball when they want to and the US men’s team have won five consecutive gold medals. It was the revival of a program that shouldn’t have needed reviving. — Harper

20. The Process begins in Philly

Tanking was nothing new in the NBA until someone did it loudly and openly. Suddenly, it was a buzzword that defied the competitive nature of the NBA.

In May 2013, the Philadelphia 76ers hired Sam Hinkie from the Daryl Morey tree of analytics and atypical roster construction. Immediately, it was obvious the Sixers weren’t interested in winning anything other than lotteries.

They put together intentionally subpar rosters, slapped a “development” sticker on it and watched the losses pile up — all in the name of amassing ping pong balls for the lottery.

Eventually, it netted Joel Embiid in 2014, Jahlil Okafor in 2015, Ben Simmons in 2016 and Markelle Fultz in 2017, all top-three picks. Go get a potential star in the draft and wait for the process to turn into wins.

Hinkie wouldn’t make it past April of 2016, as the Colangelos took over at the behest of the NBA. To this day, there are still plenty of people who “Trust the Process.” Unfortunately, the Process has still failed to yield even a conference finals appearance. — Harper

21. Bucks walkout before Bubble playoff game

In July of 2020, NBA players made their way to Disney World outside of Orlando, Fla. to enter The Bubble. There, they were to resume the 2019-20 NBA season that had been postponed because of the global COVID-19 pandemic. When the season continued, the 22 teams in playoff contention finished the regular season and then the playoffs got underway.

On Aug. 26, the Milwaukee Bucks, up 3-1 in their first-round series against the Orlando Magic, refused to emerge from their locker room for Game 5.

The Bucks remained in their locker room as a response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake — a Black man in Kenosha, Wis., just 45 minutes away from Milwaukee. The team’s protest ultimately led to the NBA postponing the rest of that day’s games and the WNBA, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer following suit in their respective leagues.

The NBA remained at a standstill as the players tried to figure out their next move and the best way to support the various social movements, including Black Lives Matter, that were evolving throughout the United States.

Three days later, the players would resume the NBA playoffs, but one of the lasting memories of the NBA bubble will be the social activism of players that reached a head with the Bucks’ walkout. — Eric Nehm

22. David Stern retires, Adam Silver takes over

For all of his faults and personality traits, David Stern was one of the best commissioners in the history of sports. Not just the NBA. He globalized in the game that took it away from tape delays and drug scandals to corporations paying billions of dollars to broadcast it.

His impact may be unparalleled. But his harsh demeanor didn’t quite fit in a softening, social media age. Adam Silver, his deputy commissioner, was unanimously tabbed as his successor to take over on Feb. 1, 2014.

Immediately, Silver was thought of as a players’ commissioner with a refreshing approach. Since then, he’s been lauded for booting Donald Sterling out of the league and criticized for being too soft on issues that could benefit from more structure and a stricter ruling hand. And the current collective bargaining agreement and era of parity is often criticized as potentially detrimental to the NBA.

With all that, Silver just agreed to a $76 billion broadcast deal that bridges traditional and digital streaming media. Ultimately, the financial health of the league is the trump card. — Harper

23. Dallas Mavericks’ workplace sexual harassment scandal

An awful work environment for the Dallas Mavericks’ female employees was allowed to fester for nearly two decades. In 2018, Sports Illustrated broke the news about a corporate culture in Dallas “rife with misogyny and predatory sexual behavior.”

The piece alleged that former CEO Terdema Ussery was a serial sexual harasser; that a sales account executive had viewed porn at work with no repercussions; and that a content writer for the team had been arrested for assault at the Mavericks practice facility, pled guilty, and still been allowed to keep his job.

An independent NBA investigation, which included interviews with 215 current and team employees, corroborated these findings. Then-majority owner Mark Cuban agreed to donate $10 million to organizations supporting women working in sports and combatting domestic violence. He also hired Cynt Marshall to run the Mavericks’ business arm. She became the first female Black CEO in NBA history. — Christian Clark

24. The 2023 CBA and the “second apron”

Ever since Danny Ainge acquired Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to play with Paul Pierce in 2007, executives — and sometimes, the players themselves — tried to form multi-star “superteams.” Even costly luxury-tax penalties couldn’t stop the league’s richest owners, such as the Clippers’ Steve Ballmer and the Warriors’ Joe Lacob, from spending more aggressively than the league’s other owners claimed to be capable of doing.

Unable to get a true hard salary cap, the NBA pushed for the next-stiffest measure in CBA negotiations: team-building penalties for the most egregious spenders. In avoiding a lockout, the league got the oft-mentioned but rarely understood “second apron.” If teams exceeded a certain total roster cost above the cap, not only would they face increasing financial penalties, but also restrictions such as the freezing of future draft picks, limitations on the capacity to make trades and the loss of the “midlevel exception.”

In the summer of 2025, teams of varying qualities made trades that lowered their overall talent, all to cut salary. The Boston Celtics, who won a title the previous year, were among them. — Eric Koreen

25. DeAndre Jordan’s free-agent “hostage” situation

It seemed like LA Clippers center DeAndre Jordan would be headed to the Dallas Mavericks in free agency in 2015, the first key defection from “Lob City.” But before the deal could be made official, Clippers stakeholders like Steve Ballmer, Doc Rivers, Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, Paul Pierce and JJ Redick all went to Jordan’s house in Houston to try to convince him to change his mind.

The events played out on social media, with players tweeting different emojis signaling the ways they were swarming the house (Redick tweeted a car, Griffin, a helicopter and Chandler Parsons, a plane). Griffin sent an all-time NBA tweet, posting a photo of a chair rammed underneath a door handle with the caption: “Don’t agree with the furniture layout but I’m not an interior designer.”

The result — Jordan remaining a Clipper — was less memorable than its real-time documentation. — Woike