NBA Insider with Ken Berger

David Stern came loaded with vitriol Friday night at Game 6 of the Nets-Raptors game. The commish was apoplectic about the academic study released last week purporting that racial bias has affected NBA officiating.

But with the postseason off to a thrilling start – Golden State’s stunning victory over Dallas, plus four stellar matchups in the conference semifinals – Stern had a lot more on his mind.

One could argue that he doth protest too much about the flimsy officiating study first published in The New York Times Wednesday, and that he should be careful not to give the story more credence by defending his system of referee oversight so staunchly.

But Stern’s strongest comment on a topic other than race and refereeing came when he rolled out a laundry list of talent that is either in the league or on the way and predicted that the next golden age of NBA basketball will begin to evolve in the next two years.

“Here we have Duncan, Shaq, Kobe, Kevin Garnett, Allen Iverson – sure, future Hall of Famers in our league – Jason Kidd, probably Vince Carter,” Stern said. “At the same time, we’ve got LeBron and Dwyane and Chris Bosh and Carmelo, and then we have Dirk and Nash and Tony Parker and the great international players that we’re looking at on Utah, and Yao, Kirilenko – still going – and we have the best draft coming in a long period of time.

“With those four groups,” Stern said, “in the next two years we’re going to have the largest number of great players playing in the NBA in its history. That’s what we should be talking about, OK?”

Stern, of course, is given to hyperbole. But I happen to agree with him on this. A strong argument can be made that once the likes of Kevin Durant, Greg Oden, Roy Hibbert, Mike Conley, et al are added to those Stern mentioned, the talent in the NBA will never have been as strong in the post-Michael Jordan era as it will be in the next few years.

One problem is that the league is still struggling to wrest itself from the era of isolation offense, which dragged down the tempo of the games and overemphasized one-on-one play. But Stern said rules changes to allow zone defense and limit hand-checking on the perimeter has the quality of play “getting to a place where it will be as good as we’ve ever had.”

“I believe that the isolation game really caused us to stagnate,” he said. “Our rules allowed it, and we encouraged it. And we made changes to do away with that. And I think that, together with the idea that anything short of an attack wouldn’t be called as the guy made his way to the basket, was not a good thing for our game.

“The game just didn’t look very good, and it’s starting to look good,” he said. “And what the rules changes do is encourage teams to do these strange things – pass, run, and shoot.”

The way Phoenix and Golden State play prove Stern’s point. But there’s still a long way to go before a majority of teams catch on.