About 30 minutes prior to a national television game during LeBron James' first stint with the Cavaliers, former general manager Danny Ferry ducked into a private room at Quicken Loans Arena to take a phone call from incensed commissioner David Stern.
Only minutes earlier, team officials told a television cameraman he wasn't going to be permitted to sit at the hash mark along the side of the court _ a right granted to him by the league's television contract. It didn't take long for that message to travel all the way up to Stern, who exploded.
Ferry and Stern, by all accounts two of the more stubborn individuals to ever work in the NBA, collided in an expletive-filled tirade that multiple people around the league can still recall vividly. Stern won and the cameraman was stationed as usual on the court in time for tip-off. But the Cavs' message was clear: Clean up the floor.
Nearly 10 years later, the league is getting there.
James was injured last June when he crashed head first into a television camera during the NBA Finals, opening a wound on his scalp that required stitches to close. Now only months later, the league has yet again reduced the amount of photographers and cameramen with access to the floor.
"If that was a serious thing with the camera, you take out the best player probably in the series," Milwaukee Bucks coach Jason Kidd said, referring to James' accident. "Now it's not about the series, it's about the cameraman instead of basketball."
Starting this year, the number of escape lanes (or runoff lanes) for players has doubled and widened. Only 18 people are allowed on the court now compared to 30 last season. The league will allow seven photographers and two team attendants per baseline. At its highest point, there were as many as 40-50 people blanketing the floor during the NBA Finals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so the decline has been gradual. The reduction this season, however, is drastic.
Disaster was avoided in June when James quickly returned to the game, but the injury again shined the spotlight on a percolating issue among teams and players. In their view, there simply was too much congestion on the court.
"Obviously I've stepped on a few cameramen in my career on the baseline," James told the Beacon Journal recently. "You've got the most athletic people in the world flying high, jumping as high as the rim and landing underneath the basket. It's unsafe for the players."
James was driving to the basket in June when he was fouled and knocked off balance by Golden State Warriors center Andrew Bogut. James stumbled before plowing into the television camera near the basket and immediately clutched his head.
"Listen, the cameras they have today could sit in the 300 level and get an HD clip," James told the Beacon Journal. "I think the NBA does a great job of responding to and respecting some of the players' wishes and that was one of them."
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The discussion of cameras on the floor has long been a sensitive issue on both sides. No other major team sport in the country allows fans and media as close to the game as basketball.
One of Stern's shining accomplishments in his 30 years was growing the game on television. His innovation is at least partially responsible for the staggering $24 billion television contract that begins this season, but all of those close-ups come with unintended consequences.
Players have tripped and fallen over cameramen stationed across the baseline for years. Freelance videographer Mark Shapiro is in his 23rd year shooting Cavs games from the baseline. By his count, he has suffered five concussions shooting sports (not all basketball), including two just last Cavs season.
After one game last season involving a collision that broke the microphone on his camera, "two EMS guys asked me if I was OK," Shapiro said. "I guess I didn't answer their questions right."
He was loaded into an ambulance and taken to Metro hospital before he was finally released around 3 a.m. Shapiro, however, was not the cameraman James hit in June.
"That was an NBA guy," Shapiro said. "I'm glad I wasn't that guy. That would've been bad. I don't want anything to do with that."
Some of the collisions are more memorable than others. The way photographers tell it, Shaquille O'Neal once wiped out the entire baseline quadrant with a fall during his one season in Cleveland. Dennis Rodman was suspended once after he angrily kicked a cameraman in the genitals after tripping over him. Shapiro, however, has never had a player react angrily after a collision.
"Some guys try to help you up, some don't," he said. "Nobody gets mad, though."
Cavs guard Joe Harris crashed into Shapiro during a game last November, although the details remain murky. Harris thought it was in the conference finals, but it was actually late November. Shapiro just remembers Harris barreling into him. The rest of the story was captured by a nearby photographer who shot frame-by-frame stills of the collision.
"Sometimes it's too hard to avoid. You're not really conscious of those guys or thinking about it," Harris said. "When you're in the game, that's the last thing you're thinking about."
There is an 8{-minute YouTube video featuring some of Shapiro's greatest hits. He has been run over by NBA players, college men and women and football players. He was hit with a flying bat once during an Indians game and concussed. Despite the new court alignment, Shapiro is one of the few who gets to keep his baseline spot and insists his job isn't dangerous _ despite the head injuries.
"I've never seen anyone get hurt terribly bad," he said. "If I thought it was dangerous, I wouldn't do it."
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For years, the Cavs have been one of the more vocal teams in trying to clear the floor of photographers. A rash of trips, stumbles and near-misses involving their players finally prompted Ferry to take action prior to that nationally televised game a few years ago, ultimately eliciting the phone call from Stern.
There were other, more civil discussions, such as during the 2007 NBA Finals when Ferry called a handful of league executives down to the court prior to a game to discuss the cameras. Most of his issues centered around the sideline cameraman, who is only present during national TV games.
Players running wide up the floor often have to jump or contort their bodies to avoid him and team officials spend timeouts kicking cords off the court.
It doesn't seem as if the sideline camera will be going away anytime soon, but the baseline has been cleaned up. The league first installed 3-foot escape lanes for the players during the mid-1990s. They have gradually expanded in size over the years and are up from 4 feet to 5 feet this season.
Additionally, the league studied where most of the falls occurred and inserted an additional 5-foot escape lane on each side of the basket for this season, creating a total of 10 feet of open space on each baseline.
James Jones, the secretary/treasurer for the players association, doesn't believe James' fall in the Finals directly prompted the new guidelines. It was merely the latest chapter in a long line of examples.
"It just became the sum of all parts," Jones said. "The longer you study it and the more you look at it, you realize with the speed and pace that guys are playing at now, it's way more frequent than back in the '80s when everything was a half-court, walk-it-up type of game."
The NBA believes it has the right formula now for player safety and media access, but is willing to make even more reductions in the future if necessary. There aren't many places left to cut.
And while Ferry is out of the league now and Stern is retired, their legendary exchange years ago remains relevant.
"Our players are bigger, faster and you're seeing more guys around that baseline or in the front row," Kidd said. "They're doing the right thing and trying to protect the athlete. And also I think sometimes you forget the cameraman. He has no defense. He's carrying the camera to provide for the people at home. It's a fine line."
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